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Max Beerbohm. Philip Guedalla, Esq. 
THE CARICATURISTS 
*Bohun Lynch, Edmond Kapp, and ‘ Quiz’, 


wondering how long the veteran exile will go 
doddering on”. 


Wiis ORY eO Ts 


PARICATURE 


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BOSTON 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 


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To H. M.M.B. 


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ia 
a 


PREFACE 


ik word history is rather portentous, and I feel that 


on the cover of a book of these dimensions it needs 

two or three words of apology. Handbook or guidebook 
would seem to me more appropriate titles but for certain 
qualities implied of which I have tried to be guiltless. 

If the art of caricature is regarded in its widest and most 
popular sense, the subject is enormous. It is big enough, in all 
conscience, if it embraces only that part of comic art which is 
definitely satiric. Reference to the bibliography at the end of this 
little book will show what I mean. Certain authors evidently re- 
gard caricature as a convenient word to cover all comic art: and 
this is a little too narrow as it is much too wide. The meaning 
given to the word by various authorities is discussed in the first 
chapter, but we arrive at a point beyond all discussion when the 
final definition virtually becomes personal, when a particular 
drawing is or is not caricature according to private perceptions 
or even the mood of the moment. Apart from satires upon in- 
dividuals, I can think of, as caricature, typifications by Callot, 
Daumier, or Max Beerbohm, but not of those made by du 
Maurier. With a field of inquiry diminished to a personal but at 
the same time decently antique definition, I beg the reader’s 
indulgence if it appears that I have sometimes shown myself a 
little inconsistent, and have allowed personal predilections to 
outweigh a sense of proportion. 

It will be found in the early chapters that much space is 
devoted to work which is not to be regarded as true caricature 
now; but which calls for detailed scrutiny as being the founda- 
tion of the art, as now understood. 

Besides acknowledgment to several authors whose books are 


1X 


PLATES AT THE END OF THE BOOK 


Frontispiece. The Caricaturists. By Max Beerbohm 
Plate 1. Isaac of Norwich 
11. Marginal Drawings from a Harleian MS. 
11. Caricatures. By Leonardo da Vinci 
Iv. The Monk-Calf of Freiberg. After a German wood-engraving 
v. Martin Luther. After a German wood-engraving 
vi. The Toper. After a German wood-engraving 
vil. ‘I'wo Figures from Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel 
vill. ‘‘ Billy’s Political Plaything ”. By Richard Newton 
Ix. General Howe and Miss——. By Thomas Rowlandson 
x. The Czar Paul I of Russia. By James Gillray 
x1. An Oxford Don. By Robert Dighton 
x11. Irlande et Jamaique. By Honoré Daumier 
xl. Algernon Charles Swinburne: a study on blotting paper. 
By Ape (Carlo Pellegrini) 
x1v. Algernon Charles Swinburne. By Max Beerbohm 
Xv. “94”: Admiral the Hon. Sir Harry Keppel. By A-O 
(Roland le Strange) 
xvI. Mr. George Grossmith. By Henry Ospovat 
xvi. Monsieur Clemenceau. By Edmund Dulac 
xvill. ‘‘ Buffoon ”: Mr. George Graves. By Edmond X. Kapp 
xIx. Mr. Edmund Blunden. By Quiz (Powys Evans) 
xx. ‘‘ As Others see us ”’. By Ralph Barton 


Xill 


ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT 


H. M. M. B. By Bohun Lynch, page vii 
Mr. Stacy Aumonier. By Aubrey Hammond, x 
A Dwarf. By Jacques Callot, 10 


La Divine Venus et Le Bel Adonis. After an early French 
caricature, 19 


A Fifteenth-Century Fashion-Caricature. From a MS. in the 
Harleian Collection, 31 


Two Heads. By Leonardo da Vinci, 45 
Mask of Charles X of France. By Charles Philipon, 56 
M. Maurice Barrés. By André Rouveyre, 69 
Mr. W. Somerset Maugham. By Miguel Covarrubias, 92 
Mr. H. L. Mencken. By Miguel Covarrubias, 96 
M. Claude Debussy. By André Rouveyre, 108 
The Earl of Lonsdale. By the Author, 120 


X1V 


Chapter I 
THE NATURE OF CARICATURE 


HE word Caricature is derived from the Italian caricare, 

to load, so that to define the art as “‘ overloaded repre- 

sentation ’’ has the merit of age and the convenience of 

brevity: but the actual word Caricatura was not used in Italy 

until the second half of the seventeenth CECILY werecestala 

méme chose que charge en peinture”’ says an old French 
dictionary—which conveys a similar meaning. 

Dr. Johnson called it “an exaggerated resemblance in 
drawings ”; Walker and Webster a “ ludicrous representation ”. 
Murray defines caricature in art as “‘ grotesque and ludicrous 
representation of persons or things by exaggeration of their most 
characteristic or striking features”, and “a portrait or other 
artistic representation in which the characteristic features of the 
original are exaggerated with ludicrous effect”. 

For the ordinary traffic of discussion we may say that carica- 
ture is, amongst other things, the portrayal of an individual, as 
seen by another, without regard to the rules of drawing. Joseph 
Conrad, in Nostromo, speaks (and, as it happens, without any 
apparent thought of caricature in his mind) of ‘‘ putting the face 
of a joke upon the body of a truth ”, which very neatly serves to 
describe at least one aspect of the art. 

A caricature may be none the worse for having a grotesque 
and impossible form: it may be none the better. Many academic 
portraits have elements of caricature in them, and Macaulay* 
suggests that the best histories contain a little of the exaggeration 
of fiction, just as “the best portraits are perhaps those in which 
there is a slight mixture of caricature”, and thereby gives his 

* The essay on Macchiavelli, 1827. 


I B 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


benediction to the intuitive faculties, which, in the want of 
absolute truth, serve better than the registration of mere “‘ fact ”’. 

On the other hand a good caricaturist needs no great talent 
in any other artistic direction: he is governed only by his own 
sense of truthful misrepresentation. He draws, as a rule, from 
memory and does not allow himself to be hampered by irrelevant 
exactitudes. Salient peculiarities remain in his mind’s eye, and 
these he puts down, exaggerated or not, at the expense of 
anatomical truths which do not interest him. Intertwined with 
physical individuality, he tries to make his drawing indicate 
character, and the better the caricaturist the less dependent is 
he, to this end, upon accessory properties. A greedy man, for 
example, is plainly and easily indicated if he is represented as 
sitting at a table “‘ groaning ”’ under masses of fine food. Such 
a drawing may be very funny, but the good caricaturist can 
suggest lips that are smacked at dishes left out of the drawing. 

Again, one method of caricature is to exaggerate these sen- 
sually smacking lips until they form the central content of the 
drawing, and even to repeat them in various forms, or suggest 
and hint at them by several symbols. Here the artist transcends 
mere exaggeration, and is making a drawing wherein fat lips 
stand for the victim: but the remainder of the face and body or 
the attitude should convey some likeness of the victim as well. 
And, when it comes to the point, considerable skill and talent 
are necessary in order that the caricaturist may preserve the 
unities of his own convention. He must not only be able to 
draw a man so that he looks like a pig: but the tweed cap he 
wears must look like a tweed cap and be unmistakable. 

It has been suggested that Horace’s vultum alicujus in pejus 
jfingere conveyed the notion of caricature; and an old English- 
Latin dictionary puts forward gryllorum pictor, a painter of comic 
figures, as a plausible rendering—which it is in so far as the Greek 
derivation of the word supplies us with the pig—the favourite 
vehicle of insult from time immemorial. Horace’s idea of putting 
the worse construction on anyone’s face is more generally true of 
caricature than not, but it is, like the symbolic porker, too narrow. 


2 


THE NATURE OF CARICATURE 


The occasional use of the word in England forestalled the 
true practice of the art. Sir Thomas Browne in his posthumous 
work on Christian Morals (1690) said: ‘“‘ When men’s faces are 
drawn with resemblance to some other animals the Italians call 
it, to be drawn in caricatura.” Later, in the Spectator for Novem- 
ber 15th, 1712, Pascal is quoted by Hughes in an essay on The 
Dignity of Human Nature : 


“ It is of dangerous consequence to represent to man how 
near he is to the level of the beasts, without showing him at the 
same time his greatness. It is likewise dangerous to let him see 
his greatness without his meanness. It is more dangerous yet to 
leave him ignorant of either; but very beneficial that he should 
be made sensible of both.” 


Hughes had been discussing partiality in the judgment of 
human nature, giving as instances politicians, who ‘‘ can resolve 
the most shining actions among men into artifice and design ”’; 
and satirists who “ describe nothing but deformity ”’. “‘ From all 
these hands,” he goes on, “ we have such draughts of mankind, 
as are represented in those burlesque pictures which the Italians 
call caricaturas; where the art consists in preserving, amidst 
distorted proportions and aggravated features, some distin- 
guishing likeness of the person, but in such a manner as to 
transform the most agreeable beauty into the most odious 
monster.”’ 

Francis Grose, in his Rules for Drawing Caricaturas (1788), 
demonstrates their origin in the following passage: 


“The sculptors of ancient Greece seem to have diligently 
observed the forms and proportions constituting the European 
ideas of beauty; and upon them to have formed their statues. 
These measures are to be met with in many drawing books; 
a slight deviation from them, by the predominancy of any 
feature, constitutes what is called character, and serves to dis- 
criminate the owner thereof, and to fix the idea of identity. This 
deviation or peculiarity, aggravated, forms caricatura.”’ 


3 


A HISTORY OF.CARTCATURYE 


Grose goes on to say that “ Caricaturists should be careful 
not to overcharge the peculiarities of their subjects, as they 
would thereby become hideous instead of ridiculous, and instead 
of laughter excite horror. It is therefore always best to keep 
within the bounds of probability. Ugliness, according to our 
local idea, may be divided into genteel and vulgar. The difference 
between these kinds of ugliness seems to be, that the former is 
positive or redundant, the latter wanting or negative. . . Con- 
vex faces give an air of dignity to their owners; whereas concave 
faces . . . always stamp a meanness and vulgarity. The one 
seems to have passed through the limits of beauty, the other 
never to have arrived at them.” 

Grose, who used as a frontispiece for his pamphlet, an en- 
graved plate giving a number of odd faces, representative of 
types subsequently classified, analyses each feature in turn. He 
distinguishes the concavo-convexo face from the convexo-recto 
face, and so forth. He prints also a plate illustrating various 
noses, mouths, and chins. “‘ The nose,” he says, “may be 
divided into the angular; the aquiline or Roman; the parrot’s 
beak; the straight or Grecian; the bulbous or bottled; the 
turned up or snub; and the mixed or broken.” 

Graham Everitt, in his English Caricaturists (1886), demands 
that Dr. Johnson’s definition be now regarded as obsolete and 
maintains that the word “ includes and has now for a long time 
been understood to include within its meaning, any pictorial or 
graphic satire, political or otherwise, and whether the drawing 
be exaggerated or not ’’. 

Everitt was writing a book the principal subjects of which 
were the Cruikshanks, Seymour, Leech, the Doyles, and 
Hablot Knight Browne (“‘ Phiz *’)—none of whom, except on the 
rarest occasions, were caricaturists in what I humbly maintain 
to be the true sense. It is true that the word “ has now for a 
long time been understood to include” all manner of things 
remote from the old meaning: caricature is not the only word of 
which this is vexatiously true. But it does seem rather a pity that 
the old word, even if it is not indigenous, should not be reserved 


4 


THE NATURE OF CARICATURE 


for its peculiar but important duty, and that “ comic art” 
should not be content with its own wider significance. 

The best elaborate description of caricature in modern 
literature, has been made by Monsieur Henri Bergson in his 
essay on Laughter*. 


“ However regular we may imagine a face to be, however 
harmonious its lines and supple its movements, their adjustment 
is never altogether perfect: there will always be discoverable the 
sign of some impending bias, the vague suggestion of a possible 
grimace, in short some favourite distortion towards which 
Nature seems to be particularly inclined. The art of the carica- 
turist consists in detecting this, at times, imperceptible tendency, 
and in rendering it visible to all eyes by magnifying it. He makes 
his models grimace, as they would do themselves if they went 
to the end of their tether. Beneath the skin-deep harmony of 
form, he divines the deep-seated recalcitrance of matter. He 
realizes disproportions and deformations which must have 
existed in Nature as mere inclinations, but which have not suc- 
ceeded in coming to a head, being held in check by a higher 
force. This art, which has a touch of the diabolical, raises up the 
demon who had been overthrown by the angel. Certainly, it is 
an art that exaggerates, and yet the definition would be very far 
from complete were exaggeration alone alleged to be its aim and 
object, for there exist caricatures that are more lifelike than 
portraits, caricatures in which the exaggeration is scarcely 
‘noticeable, whilst, inversely, it is quite possible to exaggerate to 
excess without obtaining a real caricature.” 


Here M. Bergson evidently apprehends what the German 
pundits might call seelekartkatur, a physical exaggeration which 
makes manifest a spiritual tendency, and which represents the 
individual not necessarily as he usually appears, or, even, as he 
has ever appeared but as, in certain and possibly fabulous circum- 
stances he would appear. This is the highest form of caricature. 


* Laughter : an essay on the meaning of the Comic. Authorized translation by 
Cloudesly Brereton and Fred Rothwell. 


5 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


The nature and province of the art is variously commented 
on. Thus:— “ La caricature, ou ce que nous appelons ainsi,” 
intimates M. Remy de Gourmont in a Preface to the brilliantly 
cruel Visages des Contemporains (1913) of M. André Rouveyre, 
“ n’est qu’un procédé de deformation, dont les miroirs convexes 
ou concaves nous donnent les types les plus ingénus,”’ leaving a 
loop-hole for individual interpretation in that “ ou ce que nous 
appelons ainsi ” ; and in a letter which introduces M. Paul Gaul- 
tier’s Le Rire et la Caricature (1906), M. Sully Prudhomme de- 
clares that before all else the essential accompanimentof caricature 
is laughter, though the caricaturist does not always himself laugh. 

In his Die Karikatur der Europaischen Volker ( rgor), Herr 
Eduard Fuchs tells us that caricature is a philosophical analysis 
of the comic elements and their media, adding that it is conscious 
comicality as opposed to naive comicality. 

From all these authorities there gradually emerges some sort 
of effectual starting-point whence we may begin to make detailed 
enquiries into the story of true Caricature, but first we must 
return for a moment to Mr. Everitt who, in the Preface to the 
work already referred to, makes an extremely suggestive estimate. 


~ Depending oftentimes for effect upon overdrawing, nearly 
always upon a graphic power entirely out of the range of ordi- 
nary art, the work of the caricaturist is not to be measured by 
the ordinary standard of artistic excellence, but rather by the 
light which it throws upon popular opinion or popular prejudice, 
in relation to the events, the remembrance of which it perpetuates 
and chronicles.” 


Caricature certainly does depend upon that emphasis which 
is commonly called over-drawing, but to say that this is out of 
the range of ordinary art is at the least debatable. 

For what is ordinary art? Is it necessarily strict and academic 
representation? It used to be, you may say? Yes, but is any 
past use or present wont, any admission of ancient or of modern 
theory, as such, allowable? Cannot we disentangle for ourselves, 
from our own observation of art, some sort of permanent 


6 


THE NATURE OF GARICATURE 


standard, without seeking the aid either of theorists or prac- 
ticians? It is very difficult to do so. 

Let us see whether a modern writer such as Mr. Roger Fry 
can help us. Whatever you may think of his conclusions, his 
approach to them is generally stimulating and lucid. In An Essay 
in Esthetics, which occurs in his book, Vision and Design (1920), 
he tells us that ‘“‘ we may . . . dispense once for all with the 
idea of likeness to Nature, of correctness or incorrectness as a 
test, and consider only whether the emotional elements inherent 
in natural form are adequately discovered, unless, indeed, the 
emotional idea depends at any point upon likeness, or complete- 
ness of representation ”’. And later: 


“ With the new indifference to representation we have become 
much less interested in skill and not at all interested in know- 
ledge ; we are thus no longer cut off from a great deal of barbaric 
and primitive art the very meaning of which escaped the under- 
standing of those who demanded a certain standard of skill in 
representation before they could give serious consideration to a 
work of art.” 


This leap from the eighteen-eighties to the nineteen- 
twenties is not to be ascribed to mere wilfulness. It seems to be, 
on the whole, a fair way of demonstrating that an almost im- 
measurable change in critical appreciation does support the 
assumption that this kind of pictorial satire is to be regarded as 
a serious art, and not a lapse, when indulged in by “‘ serious ” 
artists, to be deplored or derided; not a mode “‘ lacking in 
elegance or descending to caricature ”? as Thackeray said of 
those drawings by George Cruikshank least admired by him. 

While, according to the modern way of thinking, much 
“ serious ” art may almost be said to be independent of exactness 
in representation, caricature, inversely, is almost dependent upon 
inexactness in representation. But the caricaturist must be suffi- 
ciently skilful in draughtsmanship to record his meaning plainly, 
and if he can add some zsthetic quality to his work, some beauty of 
line or of colour, or an adroit sense of design, so much the better. 


fi 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


As to the light which the caricaturist throws upon popular 
opinion and popular prejudice, and by which, Mr. Everitt 
maintains, he is to be measured, this surely applies only to 
caricature in that author’s wide sense of the word—that is, the 
sum of comic art—after true caricature has been very carefully 
subtracted from it. It may be said indeed that the popularity of 
true caricature is in inverse ratio to its excellence. This especi- 
ally applies to the caricature of individuals. For one thing, a 
subtle caricature is wholly wasted upon the majority ; for another, 
caricature which involves adverse criticism, physical or other- 
wise, is apt to arouse feelings of personal hostility to the artist 
in the breasts of Opposing partisans. Moreover, the inner history 
of certain journals is as well supplied with evidence of the fury 
of individuals who have complained about caricatures made of 
them as it is of records of persons who have paid large fees for 
the publicity of being caricatured at all. 


use our eighteenth-century caricaturists made of their “ ears is 
for the literary side of their work was admirable. Later, when we 
come to investigate the caricaturists of that period, I hope to 
show that, really, their eyes were neither idle nor unperceiving ; 
and that in those less Squeamish days there was a widespread 
enjoyment of the art which may be said to have reached popu- 
larity, though it must be remembered that popularity then and 
now is an almost irrelative conception. It is probable that the 
more general satires—what are now usually called cartoons—of 


8 


ae 


eee ee eee 


mite NATURE OF CARICATURE 


Gillray and his like found more favour than his less eloquent, 
less “ literary ”’ caricatures; but the Dightons, who were strict 
caricaturists of individuals, had a considerable following, just 
as, much later, had Carlo Pellegrini, ‘‘ Ape” of Vanity Fair. 

Nowadays, the true caricaturist has fervent, intelligent, but 
few admirers in England, and the English in general find delight 
in political, polemical, or social “ cartoons”? from which all 
satire except of the broadest description has been ruthlessly 
eliminated. For the delectation of the educated classes the most 
genteel humour is mingled with an occasional drawing of serious 
import, not unfortified by pomposity. As for the purely popular 
cartooning of the twentieth century, we are condemned by our 
own old standards and without searching for odious comparison 
abroad. We have exchanged the savage, “‘ coarse’ vulgarity of 
a century ago for the more insidious vulgarity of an imbecile 
and spurious refinement. The napkin which served (etymologic- 
ally speaking) both to keep the infant dry and for use at meals 
has become the serviette which even vitiates the good traditional 
speech of the labouring classes: and the honest sweat of the 
gardener has been transmogrified into an almost unmentionable 
perspiration. 

But there is good and true caricature now, as in the past, and 
here in England, as abroad. And it is well enough understood 
and warmly enough liked to be encouraged to persist. 

That most lucid critic, Mr. Charles Marriott, once asked at 
what point between accuracy and interpretation was the truest 
portraiture to be found? He observed also (upon another occasion, 
in The Nation and Atheneum), that most people in their heart 
of hearts preferred a photograph to a painting. 


“Ask the lover or the bereaved parent,” he said, “.... 
we trust the camera because it has no opinions . . . or rather 
because its opinions are known and calculable . . . the simplest 
person knows that there is something to be allowed for the 
machine.”’ And— 

“ Following up this clue, we see that, next to the photograph, 


9 


A HISTORY: OF CARICATURE 


the human heart trusts the caricature—which is all opinion. We 
may not agree with the opinions of the caricaturist about that 
particular subject, but they are frankly exposed, and we know 
what allowance to make for them.” 


Here is a test, not watertight, but it will serve. Taking a cue 
from Mr. Marriott, take also a serious drawing, a portrait—plain, 
correct, uninspired—a simple likeness of a friend in a top hat, a 
tail coat, and so on. Frame it and hang it on a wall. How dull! 

Then take a caricature of him, with exaggerated eyebrows, 
no ears, the topper emphasized, the stoop made salient and— 
again—so on. Frame that, and hang it. How interesting! 

The first is silent, the second speaks. A fairly good caricature 
excites interest and admiration: but only a very good portrait 
does that. 

The critic was wrong who remarked that caricature is to 
portrait what farce is to comedy, and that it chooses the mon- 
strous instead of explaining the average. For that is exactly what 
good caricature can do and does, even if it seldom finds the 
subject worth while. 


A Dwarf: after a drawing 
by Jacques Callot 


a ee ee ee ee ee ee ee. ee 


Chapter II 


FROM THE ANTIQUE TO THE MIDDLE AGES 


ARICATURE, even of the conscious sort, is of the 
( extremest antiquity. ‘The impulse which makes the 

small boy draw an unflattering likeness of his master 
upon the flyleaf of his ‘‘ Liddell and Scott” is about as old as 
human nature, just as is that other impulse under which ob- 
scenities are drawn or written upon walls. 

In the past the art was generally used as a weapon by sub- 
jection against authority. In the course of its long history 
caricature has been malign, benign, and impartial, but malice 
has preponderated. More often than not laughter is at some- 
body’s expense. 

The Egyptians made drawings of men as animals and their 
motive was not always obvious. On one papyrus at the British 
Museum (10016, 1) of the time of Rameses III, a lion is found 
playing draughts with an antelope. This papyrus is the proto- 
type of the modern “ strip-picture ’’. Next to the lion, a hyena 
plays the flute: then there is a cat apparently waving a crooked 
stick. The drawing in question may be a parody of two people 
playing draughts which is to be seen in the Book of the Dead. 
In another papyrus at Turin, used as the last plate in Lepsius’ 
Auswahl, the lion-headed Pharaoh is seen with a lady in the 
form of a gazelle. In a carving on the wall of a tomb Osiris on 
his throne condemns a soul to perdition. In the form of a pig 
the soul is ferried back in a boat to earthly life by two cynoce- 
phalic monkeys. The Reveller of the modern Punch finds realistic 
prototypes in ancient Egypt, one of whom—a lady too—is 
depicted in the act of being sick just before her handmaiden 
with a basin can reach her. Such a drawing as this may be a 
typification, or it may be a personal record. 


II 


A ALS TORY OF VCART CATO 


In Indian frescoes we find Krishna riding on an elephant 
daintily formed of a number of damsels in appropriate attitudes: 
one forms the trunk, the legs of another the tusks, the hair of 
the girl who is one of the hind legs makes the tail, and so on. 
The design is helped out by draperies. A similar arrangement 
represents a bird, one of the girls walking upon her hands. 

The Greeks burlesqued their gods, and on one large vase the 
oracle of Delphi is devastatingly satirized. In this, Chiron is 
seen being helped up the steps to consult the oracle, pushed from 
behind and pulled from above, while at the same time he leans 
upon a crooked stick. The faces and attitudes in this painting 
certainly belong to the realm of true caricature, as does the 
apotheosis of Heracles painted upon a vase in the Louvre. Here, 
frowning with repellent ugliness, he holds up his club, while 
beside him in the chariot a snub-nosed Hermes drives the team 
of four obviously unwilling centaurs. 

On another vase Zeus is found beneath the window of 
Alcmena, and Hermes is bringing him a ladder. Alemena in 
profile, with her hands upon the sill, is attractive enough, but 
the faces and especially the figures of Zeus and his attendant can 
only be described as rude. What may be a parody of this painting 
may be seen on an Etruscan vase, where the lover, hideous in a 
comic mask, climbs the ladder to the window giving what may 
be coins, or, more innocently apples, to the lady. N earby stands 
his servant holding a torch, a wreath, and a little bag of just the 
kind carried by women to-day. In several of the Greek caricatures 
the names of the victims are written, not over or under, but in 
and about the drawings themselves. 

Roman comic art, which was profuse, also included some 
caricature. Excavation at Pompeii and elsewhere has exposed 
many drawings of Little People, small bearded pigmies who are 
shown in perennial warfare with the geese, which are drawn as 
of about the same height. Pliny and others talk of these pigmies 
quite seriously. M. Jules Henri Champfleury* suggests that 
drawings of them were made to amuse children. They were, in 

* Hustowre de la Caricature Antique. 


I2 


FROM THE ANTIQUE TO THE MIDDLE AGES 


fact, just the fairies whose lore so many modern mammas regard 
as reprehensible. The Romans delighted too in drawing animals 
and birds following the pursuits of men, driving chariots and so 
forth. While no doubt many a Roman soldier chalked up a 
malicious caricature of an unpopular centurion. At Hercu- 
laneum the famous fresco painting of the flight of Aeneas 
carrying Anchises on his shoulders and leading Ascanius by the 
hand can hardly be brought under the head of caricature as the 
drawing is or is intended to be exactly representational. But a 
parody of this flight was made in which the figures, though 
otherwise human, were given the heads and tails of dogs. ‘Tragic 
and comic masks for use in the theatres, on the other hand, were 
manifestly exaggerated. In 1857 demolition in a narrow street 
of Rome in the gladiators’ quarter, near the Forum, uncovered. 
a rough, scratched drawing which was intended as a caricature 
of the Figure on the Cross, which is given an ass’s head. Beneath 
stands a man with one arm uplifted. About them the legend is 
scrawled: AAEZAMENOS SEBETE(I) OEOZ—Alexamenos worship- 
ping his God. This merely exemplifies the contempt in which 
Romans held the early Christians. 

In the museum at Avignon there is a gross caricature of 
Caligula in bronze, and other instances will suggest themselves 
to students of Roman art, such as philosophers with huge heads 
and little bodies, the only form of caricature widely accepted and 
understood in England to-day; and persons of intemperate 
habits, like the Egyptian lady referred to, being sick. 

Early Chinese and Japanese art is full of caricature of a sort, 
or at least of comic drawings in which distortion plays a pro- 
minent part. 

James Peller Malcolm, in his Historical Sketch of the Art of 
Caricaturing (1813), devotes a good deal of space to the lusus 
nature, to people of whom we say in common speech: “ You 
can’t caricature them; they are caricatures to start with.” Taking 
this quite literally, Malcolm explores physical idiosyncrasies as 
such in life, and not as drawn, and proceeds to describe the 
ugliness of savages, the physical blemishes of unusual features. 


mY 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


There is much in his book, ill-arranged as it is, of direct and of 
what I may call collateral interest. As an example of the latter 
he shows us that the desire to find an improving and uplifting 
purpose for his work, so frequently found in later years of the 
nineteenth century, had already set in; and did not await, as is 
often supposed, the accession of Victoria. Caricature has, he 
tells us, ‘‘ reached a degree of perfection which has rendered it 
one of the means for the correction of vice and improper con- 
duct”. And he goes on later: “ The History of Caricaturing 
though even intended to be general, would naturally narrow into 
that of English Caricatures; for the obvious reason, that in no 
other country has the art met with equal encouragement, 
because no other portion of the globe enjoys equal freedom.” 

Coming to Saxon times and later, Malcolm includes any in- 
complete or non-representational art within caricature, and in 
one of his plates he illustrates a pillar of the west door of Ledbury 
Church, in Herefordshire, which has a capital of “ neatly 
executed foliage”, which terminates in a head. From the mouth 
of this issues the shaft of the column. 

He also illustrates a drawing of the Temptation from a Liber 
Psalmorum (‘ cum versione Saxonica ”) in the British Museum 
in which Satan can be described as the caricature of a man, with 
claws and up-turned nose. He has no horns or hooves, but he 
is provided with hocks, and a subsidiary face appears from the 
back of his neck. These subsidiary faces in various inappropriate 
parts of the body were much favoured by the early monks in 
depicting fiendish personalities. 

Viollet-le-Duc (famous as the author of the great work on 
French furniture) tells us in his Dictionnaire d’ Architecture that 
Previous to the year a.D. 1100 there were few traces of the 
Devil in the churches, and in much earlier times none at all. But 
after the opening of the twelfth century, the Devil becomes 
important and is constantly found in sculptures and frescoes. 
Here perhaps we may trace the beginnings of the Religion of 
Terror, that punitive theology which is only now passing away. 

In the Middle Ages there was practically no art that was not 


14 


FROM THE ANTIQUE TO THE MIDDLE AGES 


definitely religious, so that we turn to carvings in cathedrals and 
churches and to missals without much hope of discovery else- 
where until the beginning of the fifteenth century. There are 
exceptions, some of which will shortly be quoted. But that 
religious art throughout Christian Europe produced actual and 
deliberate caricature in great abundance there is no doubt. When 
the world was younger and the succession of faith less protracted, 
simple people found a homely and everyday application for their 
religion, which was a matter-of-course, and which contained 
much provender for laughter and merry-making. People un- 
spoilt and unhampered by puritanical repressions find the same 
applications, with much of the same laughter, to-day. The 
Italian peasant, for example, sees nothing incongruous or un- 
seemly, at a village festa, in going into church to pray, in coming 
out for five minutes’ chat with a friend over an ice-cream and in 
returning to the church, much heartened by this carnal indul- 
gence. A similar attitude of mind prevailed amongst simple folk 
at one time in England. 'To them there was nothing irreverent 
in making jokes out of their religion. So we find gargoyles and 
corbels which are almost certainly personal caricatures, and 
groups sculptured at the heads of capitals and carved beneath 
miserere seats representing scenes in which individuals played 
their (often somewhat undignified) parts. Many of these carvings, 
both in wood and stone, were according to modern taste too 
gross to be endured and some of them, notably at Rheims, were 
long ago destroyed, or at least expurgated with the chisel, on 
that account. Here caricature and comic art in the wider sense 
alternate, and while sometimes they are distinct to the observer, 
they no doubt arose from similar impulses in the artist. Scenes 
of flagellation are common and a victim on a miserere seat at 
Sherborne is found in the appropriate attitude and appropriately 
unclothed in the act of being birched. Malcolm illustrates a 
number of these seats and carved capitals with his own engrav- 
ings, though only those, of course, of the eminently decorous 
type. But we may be sure that the writer who could trace no 
encouragement of caricature except in England will have some- 


15 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


thing illuminating to say about those carvings which are obscene, 
and we are by no means disappointed. 


“ Had the dignitaries of these churches directed the persons 
employed in ornamenting them to confine their excursions within 
the bounds of decency, we might have smiled at the perversion 
of taste, though we condemned the introduction of anything 
ludicrous to a place of worship; but there is no demonstration 
extant more convincing of the general profligacy of manners 
amongst the clergy before the Reformation, than the discovery 
beneath their seats of subjects, which, if engraved at present, and 
placed in a print-seller’s window, would cause him to be prose- 
cuted as a promoter of vice. It has been said that this method was 
adopted by different orders of the religious to satirize each 
other; and some of the carvings I have seen were probably in- 
tended as caricatures of particular persons.” 


Malcolm was also, it seems, upset by the drawings in the 
prayer-book of Queen Mary (daughter of Henry VIII), and he 
contrived to twist her possession of the book to his own purpose 
in reviling her religion “in defence of which she spread ruin 
and desolation through her kingdom ”’. 

Certainly a good many carvings and drawings of the period 
under review are a little ‘“ rude ”’ in the nursemaid’s sense of the 
word, but a certain delight in indecency in one form or another 
somehow seems to linger in the generality of mankind, though 
the manners of the age have now (for the most part) supplanted 
the carved or designed record. Since Malcolm was writing 
within the lifetime of Gillray and Rowlandson one admires his 
restraint in not seeking to discover in their rather broad effects 
the covert devilries of a Popish plot. 

At all events, the expression of indecency has been and is a 
question of custom, and we may rest assured that so far as 
Malcolm’s argument is concerned the profligacy of the clergy is 
beside the point. 

M.Champfleury quotes a letter from the Maxima Bibliotheca 


16 


meOMO THE ANTIQUE TO THE MIDDLE AGES 


Patrum, in which St. Nilus* in the fifth century wrote to Olym- 
piodorus of Alexandria: Was it seemly to represent animals of 
all sorts on the walls of the sanctuary, so that one could see 
snares set for them, and hares, goats, and other beasts seeking 
safety in flight while, behind, the hunters weary themselves in 
the chase and without respite follow with their hounds... ? 
It was just childishness to amuse the eyes of the faithful. 

M. Champfleury also quotes St. Bernard, then Abbé of 
Clairvaux writing in the twelfth century to William, Abbé of 
Saint-Thierry and complaining of the monstrosities used in the 
decoration of sacred buildings. 

St. Nilus’ answer is significant and explains the presence of 
all caricature or ludicrous art of whatever kind in the cathedrals. 
Like the Roman pigmies referred to earlier it was done “ to 
amuse the children ’’—grown up or otherwise. “‘ The policy of 
that wonderful organization (the Roman Church) has been in 
every age’, comments James Parton in Caricature and other 
Comic Art, “to make every possible concession to ignorance 
that is compatible with the continuance of ignorance. It has 
sought always to amuse, to edify, to moralize, and console 
ignorance, but never to enlighten it.”’ 

This is not, perhaps, a perfectly fair statement of the case, 
but—one knows what he means. 

At any rate the crudities and barbarities referred to no doubt 
kindled the imagination and brought home to simple folk the 
horrors following misbehaviour. And the worst of them were 
harmless, if only because they were frank and not furtive. 

The Devil was the personality most often chosen as a subject 
for caricature, but as we are still a little uncertain (in despite of 
Mr. Beerbohm’s adventure in the company of Enoch Soames, 
and of other authorities) regarding his exact appearance, it is 
difficult to say what naturalistic merit these caricatures may have. 
In the British Museum there is a Biblia Pauperum of about 


* St. Nilus of Constantinople, who appears to have been a disciple of St. 
Chrysostom and one of the early Iconoclasts: not the later saint who founded 
a monastery of Basilians near Rome. 


17 Cc 


ACHTS TORY OFSCARIG Al tre 


1475, which was once the property of George III, and which 
contains a woodcut representing the Temptation. There are 
the figures of Christ and Satan, and the high mountain with one 
tree upon the top of it, and the pinnacles of the Temple. In this 
drawing the Devil has a man’s hands, horns, webbed feet and 
a second face da dietro, as the Italians say. His main face is 
dreadful, with an enormous mouth and huge teeth, and long 
flopping ears like a retriever’s. In his hands he holds the stones 
which he tempts Christ to turn into bread. 

In the cathedral at Strasburg one carving represents a fox 
leaning from a pulpit, with outstretched pad, preaching to a 
flock of geese: in another beasts of somewhat doubtful species 
form a procession ; one carries a mop and a pail, the next a cross, 
a little rabbit follows with a lit torch, and so on. At Magdeburg 
a tiny maiden milks a colossal sow, and on another capital nearby 
a monkey tucks a huge fiddle under his chin. A bas-relief at 
Autun shows souls being weighed in the scales—a much favoured 
subject—an archangel superintending the process on one side, 
a devil on the other. Neither is playing fair, for outstretched 
hands clutch at the balance, trying to drag it down. In this 
instance, happily, the archangel has tilted the scales well to his 
side, and the expression of horror and disgust upon the op- 
ponent’s face shows that he realizes all his effort to be futile. 
These instances are but a few from many which typify medizval 
stone carvings, and in most of them the caricaturish element (as 
opposed to unintentional crudity) is manifest. In all forms of 
art, exaggeration in one dimension or another is necessary to the 
comprehension of simple folk. 

In the eighteenth century, during the demolition of the 
ancient chateau of Pinon in Picardy, a bronze seal was found 
which bears the inscription LE : SCEL : DE : LEVECQUE : DE: LA: 
: CYTE : DE : PINON.—The seal of the Bishop of the City of 
Pinon. This seal is of the usual pointed oval shape, and engraved 
within the bordering legend is a monkey seated with legs crossed 
on a bishop’s throne, wearing vestments and a mitre, and 
holding a crooked staff. Two attendant monkeys are on either 


18 


feomelHE ANTIQUE TO THE MIDDLE AGES 


side of him. It has been suggested that this seal was made in 
order to ridicule the Church: but M. Champfleury shows that 
the more probable explanation involves no malice of the kind. 
On the contrary certain prelates, having a sense of humour, 
ordered comic seals of this sort to be made for them, and M. 
Champfleury quotes the instance of Guy de Munois, Abbé of 
Saint-Germain d’Auxerre from 1285 to 1309. The legend on 
his seal read: Abbé de singe air main d’os serre. The good man 
was, in the phraseology of the modern schoolboy, “ trying to be 
funny ’’—at his own expense. 

Down to the sixteenth century caricature was mainly confined 
to the presentment of good and evil, of God and the Devil. Then, 
with the great cleavage brought about by the Reformers and 
later, the Puritans, the art became the weapon of warring sects, 
and in its true form was most conspicuous in religious enmities. 
A more general application is, however, to be observed in the 
satirical drawing by Holbein and others in which the figure of 
Death predominates. But the Dance of Death series can hardly 
be included in the category of true caricature. 


a 
( ~ 


~ i 


ph 


Hig 
li Ap iy 


! 


h 
(Hh 
NWN 


“‘ La Divine Venus et Le Bel Adonis.” 
After an early French caricature 


Chapter III 


EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE 


Ticats gargoyles and certain faces carved on the 


stalls of churches and beneath miserere seats were 

almost certainly personal caricatures, the more familiar 
medium of drawing brings satire home to our modern minds 
with greater facility. A manuscript, illustrated with a pen and 
ink drawing, or an early woodcut are more readily comparable 
with, say, an etching by Dighton or a design by Gulbransson. 
Very early drawings of the kind are rare and are peculiarly 
interesting when their subjects are the same as those exploited 
in a similar manner to-day. The Jews, for example, have been a 
source of inspiration to caricaturists from the very earliest times 
until the present day. They were foreigners by race and religion, 
and foreigners have usually been the subject of jokes. That is a 
short-coming, not solely English, seldom but sometimes excused 
by the quality of the satire. Down to the last hundred and fifty 
years the Jews were solely associated with usury in one form or 
another, and this occupation together with the Jewish (or rather, 
as I am assured by some Jewish friends, Hittite) nose naturally 
lend themselves to pictorial exaggeration—not infrequently at 
the hands of Jewish artists. And so we find it exaggerated so long 
ago as the year 1233 in a drawing on a vellum roll which is to be 
seen at the Record Office.* 

This caricature is the unofficial but relevant illustration at 
the head of a Rotulus Fudeorum, and presumably the work of a 
clerk in the Exchequer. 

At the period in question, Isaac of Norwich, an exceedingly 
wealthy Jew, was the principal creditor of the abbot and monks 


* Receipt Roll, Exchequer of Receipts, No. 1565, E. 401. 
20 


EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE 


of Westminster, who were supported by the especial sympathy 
of Pandulf, Bishop Elect of Norwich and Papal Legate. Pandulf 
was active in his endeavours to expel the Jews from the country. 

Isaac was a moneylender and merchant. He owned a quay at 
Norwich where his ships could load and unload, and whole 
districts were mortgaged to him. 

The caricature which is drawn with pen and ink represents 
Isaac standing in the midst of a group of Jews on the walls of a 
castle, and towering above them. He is crowned and is given 
three faces, one full and two in profile. Pike* suggests that a 
fourth face looking away from the observer, is, as the gram- 
marians say, to be understood; and Isaac is, therefore, looking 
towards his possessions North, South, East, and West. Beneath 
him are a less distinguished Jew called Mosse Mokke (subse- 
quently hanged for clipping coin) and a Jewess named Avegay. 
Between these two stands a horned devil with a forefinger upon 
the pronounced nose of each. On Avegay’s left is Dagon, god of 
Philistia, in a turret: and beyond him are certain friends in 
armour. On the other side of the drawing behind Mosse Mokke 
a figure holds up some scales loaded with coin. This drawing 
fills an apex at the head of the roll, the parchment having been 
cut to a point at some time and pasted onto another piece of 
parchment behind it. The ink used is of a reddish brown, and 
though rather crumpled the whole document is in a good state 
of preservation. 

To about the same period belongs a stout little book, which 
is rather confusedly referred to by Malcolm. This is No. 928 
of the Harleian collection, preserved in the Department of 
Manuscripts at the British Museum. On the first page Harley’s 
librarian has written his own name—Humfredus Wanley. In the 
catalogue Wanley refers to the book as “ bought of me, being 
written by three different hands”, and he adds the following 
notes about it: 


“1. The main body of the book was (I believe) written in 
* History of Crime in England. By Luke Owen Pike. London. 1873. 
21 


A AI STORY (OFLC ARLCA Tae 


France, by some eminent Librarius or Book-writer, during 
the reign of our K. Henry the third; who also adorned it with 
many curious and well-drawn Pictures, the rudeness of the age 
considered. Among which pictures many (as may be seen) were 
intended to expose the wicked and inordinate lives of the then 
clergy, who were hated by the Librarij, as taking away much of 
their business. 

2. I find certain Ejaculations to our Saviour, &c., written 
on several pages and Leaves at the beginning, not touched by 
the Book-writer; which may have been done a.D. 1428 according 
to the Observation, inserted by a recent hand. . . . 

3. The latter part of the Book, is of an English hand, and of 
English Parchment, written about the latter end of the reign of 
K. Henry the VI. The Book contains the Hore B. Mariz, with 
Collects, &c. for the Holy days, whose Rubricks are in F rench; 
the Office for the Dead; and some of the Psalms: all in Latin.” 


The book, which is in almost perfect condition, is exquisitely 
written, with illuminated capitals. The margins of all the pages 
in the earlier part contain coloured drawings which emphatically 
belong to the realm of caricature in the old Italian sense, as the 
following rough descriptions will show: 

a. An animal, with the head of a monk, has his tail knotted 
with that of another having the head of a dog. The two faces 
exchange glances of disapproval. 

8. On the contorted bodies of lions are seen two monks’ 
heads. 

y. An animal whose fore-paws are turned backwards has the 
head of a man in a cowl: the tail becomes the neck of a Gorgon, 
from whose head in turn another neck-tail is joined to a second 
animal with a monkey’s face beneath its cowl. 

6. A woman and a bearded man share a neck and a body 
without arms, but having a large tail. 

e. ‘The head of a priest, in vestments, has the body of a dog: 
and there is another head upon the end of the tail which turns 
and bites its own neck-tail. 


22 


4 = = — -— ne ee ee ee er. SS 
2 a ne a ee ee ee ea eee ee 
—— . er 


MARL YeSEGULAR CARICATURE 


¢. A boar’s head on a monkey’s body grins at the face of an 
old man which grows from a dubious four-footed creature. 

». Another doubtful beast wears a Bishop’s mitre and is in 
evident colloquy with a web-footed animal half-fish and half-dog. 
g. A kind of monk-centaur has a nun riding on his back. 

.. A blue-cowled monk, with a scarlet body and cloven feet. 

Then there are numerous animals without any human 
characteristics. A red-jacketed monkey rides on the back of a 
(St. Bernard) dog. A blue dragon with a white face bites his 
own tail. A strange four-footed beast wears the most engaging 
little curls at the side of his face. A little fat animal with no tail is 
of a beautiful pink and has innocent blue eyes. 

The drawing and colour of these little caricatures are alike 
beautiful. The faces belong to the best tradition of thrifty pen 
and ink work, without one unnecessary line; and the expressions 
on the faces are delightfully rendered. It is easy to imagine that 
some of these faces were first-rate caricatures, and, as it happens, 
if I may find present opportunity in old occasion, some of them 
do make admirable caricatures of living persons. May it be 
suggested, with no lack of respect, that Mr. Birrell and Mr. 
Bertrand Russell, for example, would find themselves as faith- 
fully dealt with here as they have since been dealt with by Max 
Beerbohm. 

In his History, Thomas Wright illustrates the English con- 
ception of an Irish warrior of the year 1280. This ferocious 
champion, wearing a tasselled cap and a sort of trousers strapped 
over his bare feet, stands in an attitude of defiance, frowning over 
his shoulder, with his arms flung back to give play to an enor- 
mous battle-axe, the favourite weapon of the Irish at that time. 
This fellow and another very like him are drawn in the margin 
of a volume, which forms a register of treaties, marriages, and 
so on, of the time of Edward I and which is in the Record 
Office. The drawings follow the written description of Giraldus 
Cambrensis, the historian (Gerald de Barri) who was made an 
Archdeacon in Wales in 1184. Later he visited Ireland as King’s 
chaplain, with Prince John. His travels in Ireland resulted in 


23 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


two works Topographia Hibernica and Expugnatio Hibernica. 
Here he writes of the Irish battle-axe with especial horror, as a 
most barbarous and frightful weapon; and he describes the close- 
fitting hoods worn by the natives, which hang a cubit’s length 
below the shoulders, and breeches and hose of one piece. Other 
marginal drawings in this manuscript show types of Welshmen, 
one with a bow and arrow, and another with a spear. 

Enemies, spiritual and otherwise, have always been the 
inevitable victims of caricaturists: so too have been the pre- 
valent extremes of fashion. Across the field of operations where 
Gillray, Isabey, Cham, Ape, and almost innumerable others 
in their respective days down to the present found food for 
satire, a French artist of the fifteenth century seems to have 
led the way. And he gave us a milch sow on ted stilts, playing a 
red harp, and wearing a tall pointed hat of pale pink. From this 
a transparent veil, exquisitely suggested with white paint, de- 
pends, falling over face and shoulders. This is a marginal 
painting amidst brilliant foliage with a gold background which 
accompanies a scene of jousting between Pierre de Courtenay 
and the Sire de Clary. The Harleian catalogue has the entry: 
‘ Beautiful vellum MS. containing the fourth volume of Frois- 
Sart, divided into two parts; finely written and illuminated.” 
The manuscript which contains many fine scenes of jousting, 
with all manner of odd beasts in the margins, was written to the 
order of Philipe de Commines about the year 1475.* 

The subject has never been better, nor more cruelly treated 
since. 

The fashionable head-dress of the first half of the fifteenth 
century is seen in a caricature of an ugly and obviously ill- 
tempered old woman whose face and head are distinctly and 
skilfully carved on a miserere seat in Ludlow church. 'T'wo 
young men, one on either side of her, seek to protect themselves 
with sword and shield respectively. 

Yet another marginal drawing, in the Luttrell Psalter, of the 
fourteenth century, shows two men, clothed, but having tails 

* No. 4379 of the Harleian collection. 


24 


EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE 


and furry, animals’ feet, fighting with beer mugs. One of them 
smashes his mug on his opponent’s pate. 

Ugliness for ugliness’ sake has from time to time throughout 
history fascinated artists who were concerned for the most part 
with its antithesis. And the principal claim that Italy has to be 
the home of caricature rests mainly on the few grotesquely ugly 
heads drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. The artists of the Renaissance 
liked to dwell, for a moment, now and then, on the various un- 
seemly departures made by Nature from the ideal. In one carica- 
ture by Leonardo you see the profile of a hideous old man 
repeated in the folds at the back of his neck. In another, Darby 
and Joan—or, rather, let us say—Amedeo and Giovanna, face each 
other, the man showing a three-quarter face, the woman in profile 
with one hand upon his shoulder. Giovanna is repulsive, with a 
meagre but protruding forehead, a squat upturned nose, long, 
simian upper lip, and no chin: her ugliness is enhanced by 
the ornate cap of the period. Amedeo, on the other hand, is not 
really ugly, nor is he grossly exaggerated. The liberties that 
Nature has taken with his features are merely the obtrusions of 
old age. He is quite typical of the ancient peasants of Northern 
Italy: his like may be seen to-day, leaning on a wall in Verona, 
drawing the sunshine into his old bones, and spitting, without 
bitterness against the world at large, into the Adige. His toothless 
mouth has fallen in, so that strong chin and fine hooked nose 
are nearly met; his curly hair is still abundant, and the lines and 
creases on his face are but those of normal toil and trouble. His 
eyes are sad, but so would yours be if you had to look for long 
upon the excessive homeliness of that Giovanna. 

In the Print Room of the British Museum, amongst original 
drawings by Leonardo, there is a page of caricatures, one or two 
of which are superb exaggerations. The ‘“‘ Giovanna ” referred 
to is repeated there together with a caricature of (it would seem) 
her sister. These drawings are made with a pen and red pigment. 

The exact travesty of the Laocoon made by Titian, about the 
year 1540, who substituted monkeys for men, is only super- 
ficially funny. This drawing was engraved on wood by Boldrini. 


25 


A HISTORY OF (CARICATURE 


Titian is said to have made this parody in order to pour ridicule 
upon a school of art in Rome, which insisted upon academic 
correctness of form as observed by the antique sculptors in order, 
so Titian held, to cover their own lack of perception in colour. 

The Laocoon has been frequently travestied since then. 

Giuseppe Ribera, claimed at one time to have been by birth 
an Italian, but really a Spaniard, was also responsible for some 
grotesques, which may or may not have been caricatures of 
individuals. One of these represents the head of an ancient of 
evil mien, loathesomely afflicted with goitre, and with hairs upon 
his nose and chin. His expression of insolence mingled with low 
cunning is felicitously caught. 

To return for a moment to the opening of the sixteenth 
century, Herr Fuchs illustrates an early German woodcut, 
dated 1510, of a gluttonous wine-bibber, with a belly so pro- 
digious that he has to wheel it before him in a barrow. His 
bristling chins pass with mere undulations into that colossal 
paunch. His head is fixed in an upward direction: upwards he 
vomits, with a slight frown. But his hat is jauntily adorned with 
feathers, and the empty gourd strapped to his back shows that 
he must trundle his barrow along the road before he can get 
more wine. A German rhyme accompanying this caricature is 
here, very roughly and with due apologies, done into English: 


As toper I have made a name: 
On barrow pushed before me 
I rest my wine-distended wame 
And grin when folk deplore me. 
It’s true I am a laughing-stock 
At whom the common people mock. 


But when I’m far away from inns 
My inward nullibiety* 

Evokes reflexion on my sins, 
Enforcing strict sobriety. 


* Used only by Bishop Wilkins, inventor of the Philosophic Handwriting, in 
1668. 
26 


EARLY SECULAR CARICATURE 


It’s true I drink too much: and hence 
—Severe attacks of flatulence. 


The gentleman with the stomach and the wheelbarrow served 
more than one turn—as well he might, for the idea is a good one. 
Sixty years later we find a German caricature of Luther treated 
in the same way. This is described in the next chapter. ‘Then in 
1635 a French caricature adopted the precise figure of the 
German toper, in reverse, except that he is breathing smoke. 
This drawing is meant to represent Matthias Gallas (1584-1647), 
Count of Campo and Duke of Lucera, who was general of the 
Austrian Army during the wars in the Netherlands, and who beat 
the French. In the caricature he is made to say: 


Je suis ce grand Gallas, autrefois dans l’armée 

La gloire de l’Espagne et de mes compagnons ; 
Maintenant, je ne fuis qu’un corps plein de fumeée, 
Pour avoir trop mangé de raves et d’oignons. 
Gargantua jamais n’eut une telle panse, etc. .. . 


The Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel, attributed to the im- 
mortal Maitre Francois Rabelais, were said also to have been 
illustrated by him. We know that the Master was an architect 
and M. Champfleury says that the savants of the sixteenth 
century had no doubt but that he was a draughtsman in a wider 
sense. The drawings illustrating the Songes are, undoubtedly, in 
his spirit; but then so from time to time, though rarely, have 
been other illustrations with the matter illustrated. Champfleury 
quotes a letter written by Rabelais in Latin from Lyons to 
Cardinal du Bellay in September, 1534, in which occurs the 
phrase Urbis faciem calamo perinde ac penicillo depingere: and 
he then proceeds to quote M. Paul Lacroix’ argument regarding 
the precise value of perinde ac. M. Lacroix* held that the words 
meant that Rabelais proposed to use pen and pencil in order to 
describe the city of Rome; M. Champfleury denies that perinde 


* Francois Rabelais : sa vie et ses ouvrages. 1854. 


2] 


A HISTORY OF CARICA? ine 


ac ever had the meaning implied, and declares that Rabelais 
merely meant that he used his pen as if it were a pencil. This little 
falling-out of two learned men is mentioned in order that the 
reader may judge by what threads reputations hang. If perinde 
ac means what Lacroix takes it to mean, Rabelais was an artist: 
if, on the other hand, Champfleury is right, . . . “‘ ce passage 
. . . doit donc étre retiré du débat”’. 

It is possible that these drawings were made by Pieter 
Brueghel, the elder, and Champfleury’s argument supports this 
theory. Whoever made them they are delightful. 

Here we have a caricature of Pope Julius II* as a dwarf, with 
bees buzzing around his head, his under-lip hugely protruding, 
his nose upturned and his collar curving forward and ending ina 
star. ‘This design is of peculiar interest, for it very obviously 
inspired one of the minor drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. In 
another woodcut, a man also snub-nosed, whose shoes dwindle 
to heels a yard or more long and end in enormous spurs, sticks 
out his under-lip considerably further than does Pope Julius 
and observes a large bird perched on the end of it. In a third, a 
villain with sword and dagger glowers out of the plate. He wears 
a very small cap tied with a string onto a very large head: and a 
pair of gloves dangle by a cord from his arm. A fourth represents 
a man from whose head a bent leg grows and whose nose is a 
horribly twisted monstrosity with seven hairs upon it. Some of 
these caricatures are regarded as, in all probability, personal. 
There is also a somewhat gross wood-engraving in this book 
of a gentleman who, like the toper, carries his stomach on a 
wheel before him. 

In others, a grasshopper suckles little birds, and a man with 
an elephant’s face has a trunk which runs along the ground 
before him, like the other fellow’s stomach, on a wheel. 

Pieter Brueghel did at all events sign and date, 1 563, a pair 


* Formerly Cardinal Guiliano della Rovere, Papal Legate to France in 1480, 
and a rival of Roderigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI, q. v.). Subsequently he was 
helped to the papal throne by Cesare Borgia, son of Roderigo. He did much in the 
cause of literature and art, and laid the foundation-stone of St. Peter’s, Rome. 


28 


Peiwiay O6GULAR CARICATURE 


of drawings called respectively The Lean and The Fat. These 
are typifications rather than caricatures and are a shade too 
horrible to be funny. The thin folk are seen in a miserable 
kitchen with a meagre fire. Those at the table quarrel over a 
bowl full of dubious shell-fish, a mother with wasted breasts sits 
in a cradle and feeds her infant with a horn. A dog, all skin and 
bone, lies under the table. A small child upturns a big cooking- 
pot to lick out the remnants of the soup, and a couple of shrewish 
women are seen driving a fat man from the door. 

The antithesis is complete. A fat man pushes out the lean 
beggar: a fat dog bites him. 'T'wo hearty lads are mopping up the 
fat from a roasting dish. Another and protuberant dog is seen 
with a long roll in his mouth. An immoderately buxom mamma 
suckles a gross infant: and at the table which is heaped with 
sausages and pies and sucking-pigs, disgusting, replete brutes sit, 
guzzling. One of their number stretches out an arm to carve 
a huge lump from a ham. A maid-servant bastes a whole pig 
upon its spit before the roaring fire. To contemplate this draw- 
ing positively spoils the appetite. 

Another drawing of Brueghel is a detailed allegory, describing 
physical greed. Here people and beasts, mostly of an apocryphal 
kind, are seen in the act of over-drinking: a monkey lifts the 
tankard to his lips, even as he draws a fresh supply from the 
barrel; a naked man is seen head-down in another barrel; a dog 
tilts up the tray on a servant’s head and snatches at the wine cup 
that is sliding from it. In the background is a windmill in the 
form of a man’s head. A ladder leads up to the open mouth, which 
is intended to be the entrance to hell. People are climbing 
up this ladder, and disappearing inside. One, however, seems 
to be getting a breath of fresh air by peering out of the 
windmill’s right ear. Pieter Brueghel was a masterly inventor 
of ingenious devils and imps, which he devised with a mingling 
of obvious laughter and implied depravity which is highly 
entertaining. 

The last caricaturist to be mentioned in this chapter 1s 
Jacques Callot, who was born at Nancy in Lorraine in 1592. He 


29 


A HISTORY OF CARIGATOURG 


is one of the few caricaturists of that period about whom much is 
known, and his story—a very old and oft-repeated one—is worth 
mention. As a child he was extremely precocious, his artistic 
taste always running towards satire. He had lessons in drawing 
from Claude Henriet and in engraving from Demange Crocq, 
engraver to the Duke of Lorraine. When Callot was still only a 
lad of twelve, the painter Bellange returned to Nancy from Italy 
and excited him with his stories about the wonders of art to be 
seen in that country. In the spring of 1604, young Callot wan- 
dered off from home, joined a troop of gipsies and with them 
tramped to Florence. Here he worked in the studio of Canta 
Gallina who tried, quite in vain, to eradicate his taste for the 
grotesque. Later he moved on to Rome where he joined an old 
friend, Israel Henriet. Not long afterwards, however, he was 
recognized by some merchants from Nancy and by them taken 
home. 

He soon escaped again and by way of Mt. Cenis he journeyed 
to Turin, but was immediately caught there by his elder brother 
who had been sent to find him. At last, however, his parents 
gave way, and he was allowed to study in Rome together with 
Henriet under Tempesta. For a living he worked as an engraver. 
In 1611 he returned to Florence where he came under the 
patronage of Cosimo dei Medici. In 1616 he made a series of 
drawings, the Caprici di Varie Figure, which he followed later 
with the Gobbi and the Balli. In the second of these series he 
was especially skilled, drawing hunchbacks and cripples that are 
odd rather than horrible. Some beg comically for alms, one 
looks slyly through a hole in his ragged hood and leans upon a 
grotesquely short thick crutch, and so forth. One of his drawings, 
dated 1615, caricatures the fashions of the age. In the background 
a number of fine folk strut and attitudinize and amongst them 
runs a poodle shaven in the mode of the present time. In the 
foreground two bespectacled raggamuffins dance with a kind of 
grim humour. The drawing of these lank figures, especially of 
their gesturing hands, is very skilful indeed. In 1628, Callot 
went to Brussels in order to pursue a more academic art 


30 


Mathie SGU LAR CARTOCATURE 


and there made the acquaintance of Vandyck. He is better 
known by his more elaborate work such as the fantastic and 
wonderfully invented Temptation of St. Anthony. He died in 


1635. 


A Fifteenth-Century 
Fashion-Caricature 


Chapter IV 
THE CARICATURE OF BIGOTRY 


ARICATURE of a kind, as we have seen, had been 
( used mainly in the Middle Ages to point a broad differ- 

ence between Good and Evil. The Reformers made use 
of the art in a narrower field, and by its means ridiculed the 
monks, and discovered the devil beneath the triple tiara. Nor 
did their antagonists abstain from reprisals in kind. 

The age of book-illustration had begun, and Holbein, before 
coming to England and settling comfortably as a painter at the 
court of Henry VIII, made designs for a number of works, most 
of which seem to have been derived in a greater or less degree 
from Brandt’s Ship of Fools. This book was published in 1494, 
and Jacob Geiler, of Strasburg, made immediate use of it as a 
model for his savage indictment of the monastic system. The 
Boats of Foolish Women by Badius was another imitation; but the 
most considerable of the books to which Brandt gave precedent 
was I'he Praise of Folly written by Desiderius Erasmus while he 
was living in England between 1497 and 1506, when he was 
between thirty and forty. In Holbein’s illustrations to this book 
general satire here and there becomes caricature. A fool in 
cap and bells preaches from the pulpit to a congregation which 
includes another fool: a monk is represented as absurdly short 
and inordinately fat. To go back a little, a miserere at the Church 
of St. Spire, at Corbeil, near Paris, now destroyed, used to show 
a Bishop of Fools clasping instead of his pastoral staff a fool’s 
bauble. 

Erasmus, with Holbein’s assistance, prepared the way for 
Martin Luther by drawing attention to certain discrepancies 
between sweet reasonableness and those aspects of the Roman 


32 


MirreCARTGATURE OF BIGOTRY 


persuasion which were considered and no doubt, from the prag- 
matic standpoint, quite rightly considered as good enough for a 
stable world and an imperishable tradition. Few traditions, how- 
ever, are imperishable, and the world, not always in pleasant 
directions, moves on. 

Erasmus saw fit to ridicule, as does the modern Protestant, 
the place in the Roman observance given to the Mother of God: 
he railed as the opponent faction still rails against the offering of 
gifts at the shrines of the saints. 

The most ferocious caricatures of the Lutheran school are 
attributable to Hans Cranach, and his better-known son, the 
German master whose paintings show so clearly the influence of 
the wood-carving in which the Germans of that epoch excelled. 
He made also drawings to interpret the opinions of the Re- 
formers. ‘The series illustrating the text of Philip Melanchthon, 
published in 1521, and cut on wood by Hans Cranach, set out 
to expose the divergence between the humble life of Christ and 
the pomp and magnificence of His Vicar. These woodcuts are 
arranged in pairs, labelled respectively Christ and anti-Christ. 
They came rather under the head of general satire than of actual 
caricature, but since Cranach did make caricatures and since the 
line between the two wavers and demands indulgence—even 
papal indulgence—they are worth reference. Thus in one 
drawing Christ is scourged and the crown of thorns is forced 
upon His brow: whilst complementary to that the triple crown is 
put upon the head of the Pope by a couple of cardinals. 'Through 
a window we get a crude glimpse of an army, blazing away very 
heartily against, no doubt, the enemies of His Holiness. 

In another pair Christ overturns the tables of the money- 
changers and uplifts a whip against those who sell doves. 
Antithetically, the Pope sits on his throne and sells sealed 
indulgences for cash down. 

Finally Cranach portrays the Ascension and, upon the oppo- 
site page, shows the end of the Pope who is cast into the furnace 
of hell by a number of delightfully and ingeniously devised 
fiends. The tonsured head of a monk, expressing obvious dis- 


33 S 


A HISTORY OF CARTGATOU Re 


comfort, rises from the curling flames to watch his master’s 
headlong arrival. 

Another caricature of the period is known as the Monk-Calf 
of Freiberg. It is superb. He has a fat grinning face in which 
the human and bovine likeness is wonderfully mingled, with a 
flattened nose, enormous lips, and a rather merry eye: warts 
grow upon his tonsured pate. He is putting out his tongue. His 
ragged habit clings tightly to his body, except where the folded 
cowl hangs upon his broad back. His extremities, including the 
tail, are those of a calf. 

The most brutal caricature of the papacy, attributed to Lucas 
Cranach, occurs in a pamphlet by Luther dated 1545. This was 
in answer to some verses issued from the opposing camp, which 
declared that Luther was the child of one of the Furies. Tu quoque 
seems always to have been a good enough retort in the sixteenth 
century. This woodcut* together with some others presently to 
be mentioned are to be found in the Department of Printed Books 
in the British Museum. 

In this first caricature a black, grinning female demon, por- 
trayed, as it were, in flagrante dolore, gives birth to the pope and, 
in the antique manner, successive scenes of his infancy are 
represented on the same plate: he is rocked in his cradle by his 
nurse Alecto, with serpents in her hair; by Megaera he is suckled ; 
Tisiphone leads him by the hand. All the time, even in the article 
of birth he wears his triple crown, which emblem seems pecu- 
liarly to have incensed the reforming party. The sympathies of a 
modern obstetrician would have been with the devilish mamma. 

(In 1545 Cranach painted a picture, which has been lost, of 
hares catching and roasting their hunters. Mere inversion of the 
usual has evidently been a stock form of humour from time 
immemorial.) 

The same series contains a caricature of Pope Alexander VI. 


* ‘The following is the entry in the British Museum catalogue: 
Luther, Martin. Abbildung des Bapstum. A collection of thirteen satirical 


wood-cuts relating to the Papacy, with German legends, most of them bearing the 
name of Luther. [Nuremberg?] 1545. 


34 


ST > ae 


i hes oy CARICATURE Ome BG Orley: 


There has been an attempt made during recent years to white- 
wash Alexander, and indeed all the Borgia family, especially 
Cesare, who owed a great deal in life both in worldly success and 
(possibly) in spiritual depravity to having a pope for a father. 
Luther, of course, maintained that Roderigo Borgia had sold 
himself to the devil, and it was hardly to be expected that his 
evident shortcomings as the Head of the Church would fail to 
provide munition for his enemies. The caricature referred to is 
of a kind not unknown to the purveyors of vulgar postcards 
to-day. A leaf folds from the top and at the first glance you see 
the usual face and figure of the Pope in his robes. Lift up the 
leaf, which reaches to his middle, and you see a devil with more 
than a fair share of demoniacal attributes. The apex of the triple 
crown is blazing, and from out of its sides grow the twisted 
horns of a ram. The bearded face is really horrible: the bifurcated 
nose ends in two sharp beaks. Sabre teeth curve up from the 
shallow under-jaw. Enormously muscular arms end in pro- 
digious talons, the left hand clasping a huge pronged fork with 
a hangman’s noose caught on it. Dragon’s wings attached to the 
arms pass imperceptibly into a flowing embroidered robe. Each 
black shoe is decorated with a cross. The breast and belly 
become a leonine face, and the inscription above, Ego Sum Papa, 
has no doubt a double intention. 

Another caricature of the series reproduced in this book shows 
a pope with an ass’s head, playing the bagpipes which is in- 
tended to demonstrate that Romish theology is comparable with 
the music of asses. 

A pamphlet by Luther and Melanchthon, was illustrated by 
another woodcut which accompanies those already mentioned. 
This describes the Pope-Donkey of Rome, “ Papa Doctor 
Theologiae et Magister Fidei”. In the background a flag with a 
device of crossed keys flies from a triple-turreted castle. The 
animal which is to represent the Pope is no mere donkey. He 
stands erect with ass’s head: he is for the most part covered with 
scales, one leg ending in an ox’s hoof, the other in a dragon’s 
claw. The right hand is an elephant’s foot which is to symbolize 


35 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURS 


the Pope’s ghostly army which treads the weak heavily under 
foot: the left, a human hand, represents his earthly army. The 
creature has a woman’s breasts and belly which stand, according 
to Melanchthon for bishops, cardinals, students, and so on. A 
bearded face as well as the head of a dragon emerge from the 
hind-quarters and these are to make manifest the fact that the 
Papacy must come to an end. 

Was this Pope-Donkey intended as a caricature? No. Luther 
and Melanchthon explained to simple folk that the beast was 
miraculously thrown dead out of the Tiber in the year 1496— 
Monstrum Romae inventum mortuum in Tiberi, anno 1496—just 
as the monk-calf was a real monstrosity sent by God for a Pur- 
pose and born at Freiberg in Saxony. It was understood, more- 
over, that God had made the original drawings Himself. These 
atrocities were taught by Luther as a substitute for the beautiful 
devilries of the Church, just as to-day—but the reader will supply 
the modern equivalent according to personal taste. 

Another medium was used at about this time, which supplies 
a good instance of caricature. A medal was struck in Germany, 
which may briefly be described as follows: 

On the obverse within the legend Ecclesia Perversa Tenet 
Facem Diabol the crowned head of the Pope is very skilfully 
merged into that of the Fiend. Looked at one way, the Pope’s 
nose is the Devil’s chin. Turn it upside down, and the Devil’s 
nose is the Pope’s chin. They have a mouth in common. The 
Devil looks pleased: the Pope does not. The same procedure is 
followed on the reverse of the medal, where a Fool in cap and 
bells shares a mouth in the same way with a gentleman in a hat. 
The legend around this second device is Stulti aliquando Sapi- 
entes. 

“ The cowl does not make the monk ”’ is the title given to a 
drawing of a wolf from whose long ears the hood has fallen back, 
and whose bushy tail shows beneath his habit and needlessly 
gives the lie to the rosary in his paw. But these caricatures had 
to be entirely fool-proof. 

The title-page of another pamphlet of 1530 has a caricature 


36 


MEV GCARICATURE OF BIGOTRY 


of the Pope as a wolf, and two wolf-cardinals attend him on 
either side. Before him are a number of geese, two of them 
crowned, carrying rosaries in their beaks. A net is stretched from 
the Pope’s paw to that of a bishop in the foreground, in which it 
is intended, according to the German script, to catch these geese. 

Another favourite caricature directed against the Papacy was 
drawn by Tobias Stimmer in 1577. This is called the Papal 
Gorgon and represents the head of the Pope as made up of 
various objects relating to the Roman observance and cere- 
monial. Thus, the nose is a fish, the hat is a bell diversely deco- 
rated, the mouth is a wine-flagon, the cheek a patten, the eye a 
chalice with a wafer upon it, the shoulder a mass-book bearing 
the triple crown and crossed keys. Peering from the orifices of 
a decorated oval border we see a bespectacled donkey, a wolf 
with a lamb in its mouth, a goose with a rosary hanging from its 
beak, and so forth. Above the heads are the words Gorgoneum 
caput. 

Another version of this drawing, attributed to Master Bat- 
man was made four years later. It is almost exactly the same as 
Stimmer’s, except that the various emblematic animals’ heads are 
arranged as looking out from the sides of the bell-crown. Beneath 
the main drawing appear feet resting respectively on a dragon and 
a lion. These are pierced and are intended to be the feet of 
Christ whose Body is covered and hidden by the Pope. 

The frontispiece of La Danse des Femmes of Marcial d’Au- 
vergne is a woodcut of the Pope and some of his companions 
being sucked through the air into the mouth of an undesirable 
beast, which serves as the entrance to hell. Over their heads 
gallops Death on horseback, arrow in hand and coffin under arm. 

And, finally, Luther wrote a pamphlet making fun of Cle- 
ment VII and to illustrate it ordered a drawing to be made, of 
an extremely intimate impropriety. These pamphlets and 
drawings were hawked through Germany during the early years 
of the sixteenth century from town to town and from village to 
village, gaining many followers for Martin Luther amongst the 
simple. 


37 


A HISTORY OF GARICATURE 


It is to be deplored that so much stronger are Protestant 
countries in works upon ancient caricature than those of the 
Roman communion, that while it is easy to multiply accounts of 
satires directed against the old faith, I have not found the same 
hospitality afforded me for research in the contrary direction. 
Nevertheless the impartial observer will be relieved to know that 
Luther and his followers did not go quite scatheless. 

Martin Luther lived from 1483 to 1546. He was ordained 
priest at the age of twenty-four, and became professor of theology 
at the University of Wittenberg. He revolted from Rome in 
1517, mainly owing to his views regarding the sale of indul- 
gences, and married in 1525 a nun, Katherine von Bora. 

It is not to be expected that his enemies would let such an 
opportunity as that escape them. 

One of the caricatures relating to this (very happy) union 
was that already referred to, which follows the convention of 
the fat toper who wheeled his stomach before him in a barrow. 
Here you have “ my rib, Kate”’, as Luther called her, dressed 
as the nun she had been, with a tub on her back to which is 
strapped a Bible. In her arms she carries a baby and she leads 
a man-faced dog by a string. Luther pushes his wheelbarrow 
loaded with his enormous belly, some books, and a few bearded 
friends. In a box slung on his back he carries a dozen or so of 
his enemies. In his left hand he holds the papal tiara inverted as 
a cup. This caricature is dated so late as 1580. 

A more impartial French critic made a drawing in which 
Luther and Calvin stand on each side of the Pope pulling his 
ears. At the same time Luther tweaks Calvin’s beard, who in 
his turn throws a book at Luther’s head. The scene takes place 
before a High Altar, and another version of this drawing is 
shown in the reverse and is the same as the first but that a 
curtain is drawn to hide a scene of martyrdom painted on the 
wall of the apse in the background. 

An unknown master made a caricature of Luther called 
“ Martinus Luther Siebenkopff”. A big body, girdled by a 
decorated belt, but with the loose sleeves and hood of a monk, 


38 


BME CARICATURE OF BIGOTRY 


and the hands holding open a book, is provided with seven small 
heads labelled according to his names and to the various aspects 
of the man, thus: Doctor—Martin—Luther—ecclesiast—vision- 
ary—visitationer—Barabbas. 

As caricature and as design the best of the drawings ad- 
dressed to the discomfort of Luther is that in which he is shown 
to be inspired by Satan. This is called the Devil’s Bagpipes and 
is dated 1521. It is a large German woodcut celebrating the 
Reformer’s examination before the Diet of Worms. Satan with 
bird’s head and claws and a face of more doubtful origin growing 
out of his belly, plays the pipes, the bag of which is represented 
by Luther’s tonsured head. The Devil is blowing into his right 
ear, while his claws manipulate the keys on the ex-monk’s long 
nose, which forms a chanter. Apart from the evident meaning, 
that is, Luther’s direct inspiration from Below, we are also to 
be reminded of the manner in which both then and since, pro- 
testing preachers have been apt to utter their enthusiasms, 
drawling through their noses. 

This caricature, like that of the wheelbarrow, has been 
repeated for one purpose or another, again and again, until 
mid-Victorian times when it served its purpose for party political 
warfare. 

Maintaining the completest innocence of any sectarian bias, 
the modern observer cannot ignore the fact that Luther and 
Calvin, whatever fruit was subsequently borne of their rebellion, 
in their own time only succeeded in substituting one set of in- 
fatuations for another. They startled simple minds into discon- 
tent by means of fables which were far-fetched, ugly, and on the 
whole less infused with the human conception of Divine Love 
than the fables they supplanted. The warfare that ensued, waged 
with dual sincerity, the terrors and suspicions and hatred still 
fill us in our not quite godless freedom with amazement. It is 
difficult to make real in our minds an age when such words as 
these, from a more responsible pen, and speaking without undue 
presumption, might have earned torture and death. But bigotry 
which adds a flavour to life, both for the bigot and for the 


5 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


spectator, is not quite dead: it is still within the bounds of the 
human imagination to conjure up the attitude of intolerance, felt 
at large in England, of the Papacy. There are living even yet 
those who would find personal ‘and present delight in the 
drawing, made in England and engraved in Holland, called 
Spayne and Rome Defeated. This drawing, reproduced by Mal- 
colm and others, and to be seen in the British Museum, is what 
we now call a “ cartoon ”’ as distinguished from a caricature, and 
it is worth a digression in order to point the difference between 
the two, as well as to exemplify the satiric art of its period. 

This engraving, published in 1621, illustrated a broadsheet 
the text of which was composed by Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, a 
vigorous Protestant, who dedicated it 

"To God. In memorye of his double deliveraunce from ye 
invincible Navie and ye unmatcheable powder Treason, 1605.” 

Events remained topical far longer in those days than they 
do now. 

Mr. Parton is at pains to suggest that some of the Pilgrim 
Fathers, then living at Leyden, may have been responsible for 
the work of graving the plate. 

The Pope with a cardinal, a bishop, a Spaniard, some 
monks, and a Jesuit sit in conclave with Satan in a tent the flaps 
of which are held open by attendant fiends. A large winged devil 
urges Guy Fawkes, with his lantern, towards the cellars of 
Westminster. A snake at the head of the steps seems to await 
him. In one hand this devil holds a papal Bull giving Fawkes his 
sanction. Various symbolic birds and animals are seen upon the 
roof of the tent. Nearby is Tylbury Camp, and Queen Elizabeth 
waiting for news; and in the sea the Spanish Armada is arrayed 
in an oval formation broken at one end by an English vessel 
firing broadsides. Cherubs blow upon the Armada and an eye 
looks down a shaft of light from Heaven towards the powder 
barrels at Westminster. Video Rideo: I see and smile, is written 
upon this beam. I Blow and Scatter, say the cherubs. Opus 
Lenebrarum: a Deed of Darkness. November ye 5, 18 written be- 
neath the windows of Westminster Hall. Most of the inscriptions 


40 


tre GARTCATURE OF BIGOTRY 


are in Latin and English, and the text adds the Dutch tongue as 
well. Here too is a piece of verse which delightfully ends: 


But Hee, whose never slumb’ring Eye did view 
The dire intendments of this damned crew, 

Did soon prevent what they did think most sure. 
Thy mercies, Lord! for everymore endure. 


Mr. Samuel Ward was flattered by the annoyance of the 
Spanish Ambassador regarding this broadsheet, which gave it a 
flaming advertisement. Ward was put in gaol, but was released 
after petitioning the king. 

The Thirty Years’ War produced bitter satires in Germany, 
including a drawing which typifies the Beast of War, his mouth 
full of spoils and his hand holding a pike and two torches, 
trampling grapes under foot. Starving folk flee from a burning 
village and men do battle on an arid plain. This satire would 
stand equally well for another war, more recently remembered; 
which, however, was not fought upon German soil. 

Many lampoons, vulgarities, and cheap caricatures were 
published against Charles I, the Cavaliers, and Archbishop Laud. 
One of these last illustrated a play called Canterburie . . . pri- 
vately acted neare the palace yard at Westminster, 1641. ‘The 
following Acts are described: 


Act I. The Bishop of Canterbury, having variety of dainties, 
is not satisfied till he be fed with tippets of men’s eares. 

Act II. He hath his nose held to the grindstone. 

Act III. He is put into a Bird-cage with the Confessor. 

Act IV. The Jester tells the King the story. 


Act II is illustrated, and (caricaturists as well as historians 
repeat one another) the same device was used ten years later, 
with regard to the exiled monarch, who is held to the grindstone 
by Scottish Presbyterians. 

In another drawing of that time we see Folly in his cap riding 


41 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


on the back of a Sectarian who is on his hands and knees: he 
has an ass’s ears and he wears a bridle which is held by Folly. 
This is called “ The Picture of an English Persecutor, or a Fool- 
ridden anti-Presbeterian Sectary ’’: and beneath are the lines: 


Folly. Behould my habit, like my witt, 
Equals his on whom I sitt. 

Anti-Presbeterain. My cursed speeches against Presbetry 
Declares unto the world my foolery. 


Most of the satire of the early seventeenth century in England 
issued from the Puritan side. Tyranny or, perhaps, feeling too 
deep for satire (if it ever is) kept Oliver Cromwell out of this 
harm’s way. A caricature of Prince Rupert was made in 1647, 
and called “ England’s Wolfe with Eagle’s clawes”’. He is dressed 
as a Cavalier, but with a snarling wolf’s head and a pigtail 
tied with a bow falls below one ear. This drawing, we are to 
understand, was intended to expose “ the cruell Impieties of 
Bloodthirsty Royalists and blasphemous Anti-Parliamentarians — 
under the Command of that inhuman Prince Rupert, Digby, and 
the rest, wherein the barbarous Crueltie of our Civill uncivill 
Warres is briefly discovered’’. But during the domination of the 
Puritans, after the Horrable Murder, everything of a humorous 
intention passed into abeyance. 

On the other hand Mr. Parton quotes a very happy descrip- 
tion written in 1636 of Puritans’ behaviour in church; this being 
occasioned by the imprisonment in Newgate of two weavers, 
‘‘ infamous, upstart prophets ”’ for heresy. 


‘’ His seat in the church is where he may be most seene. In 
the time of the Sermon he drawes out his tables to take the 
Notes, but still noting who observes him to take them. At every 
place of Scripture cited he turnes over the leaves of his Booke, 
more pleased with the motion of the leaves than the matter of 
the Text; For he folds downe the leaves though he finds not the 
place. Hee lifts up the whites of his eyes towards Heaven when 


42 


2m ; 


PeaeseCARIGATURE.OF BIGOTRY 


hee meditates on the sordid pleasures of the earth; his body 


being in God’s Church, when his mind is in the Divel’s Chap- 
pell.”’ 


After the Restoration many amusing caricatures of the 
Parliamentary leaders were printed on playing-cards, such as 
“ Don Haselrigg of ye Codled Braine ” and ‘‘ Lambert ”—that 
is, General Lambert—* of ye Golden Tulip ”’. 

Directly Charles II married a Portuguese princess “‘ Popish 
Plot ” caricatures were revived, and Maria of Modena the second 
queen of James II is found making her confession to Father 
Petre, in the guise of a wolf. Over this drawing are the words 
Converte Angliam; and under it the proverb “ It is a foolish 
sheep that makes the wolf her confessor”’. 

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an especially 
prolific occasion for caricature; and this opportunity was 
admirably seized by Cornelis Dusart, the Dutch artist, and pupil 
of Adrian van Ostade. The Huguenots fled into England and the 
Netherlands that year (1685) and the next: and for their delec- 
tation no doubt, in 1691, Dusart brought out a book* containing 
twenty-five caricatures engraved by Gole, of notable adver- 
saries, including Louis XIV himself. Almost from his accession 
and certainly to his grave this king was pitilessly pursued by the 
scorn of his enemies. Here we have a caricature of him in a circle 
labelled LE ROY DE FRANCE: Vhomme immortel Chef de la 
Ste. Ligue. A mean little face is drawn as a sun surrounded by its 
rays and enveloped in a huge monk’s hood. The hand is seen 
holding a smoking torch. Beneath the engraving is the rhyme: 


Mon soleil parsa force eclaira l’heritique, 

I] chassa tout d’un coup les brouillards de Calvin: 
Non pas par un Zele divin. 

Mais a fin de cacher ma fine politique. 


* La Procession Monacale conduite par Louis XIV pour la conversion des Pro- 
testants de son Royaume. 


43 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


This is followed by some splendidly malicious caricatures of 
which three are particularized here. 

The first is Madame de Maintenon—Veuve de Scarron. She 
too is given the monkish cowl, falling away from her almost 
bald head: her eyes are set crookedly, her mouth wide open, her 
upturned nose is adorned with a large pimple. Her ear-rings 
alone faintly suggest her sex. 

The Archbishop of Paris (Plus ami des Dames que du Pape), 
leers horribly with a cap over a winking eye and put his tongue 
out: his contours and expression suggest debauchery. He is made 
to say: 


Le grand Louis et moi avons mémes desseins: 

Nous somes fort galans, nous aimons fort les dames: 
Il est vray que cela nous rend tout de infames: 

Mais nous serons pourtant un jour au rang des saints. 


Asne Mitré is the title given to the Archbishop of Rheims 
the famous Pére la Chaise. He has a snub nose, open animal 
mouth, and heavy bearded jowl. Huge keys dangle at his neck; 
and his mitre, composed of playing cards, bottles, and clay pipes, 
is tilted so as completely to cover one eye. 

This series is pleasingly drawn, the linen of vestments being 
most deftly treated. 

Louis XIV was an easy butt. He stood only two inches over 
five foot; but his shoemaker and perruquier between them gave 
him another ten. He was caricatured as a cock pursued by William 
IIT as a fox, as a town-crier of Versailles, as a jay, as a tiger on 
trial by the other beasts, trompé by de Maintenon, sharing the 
stocks with the Pope, while the Devil behind them bangs their 
heads together. Finally, Thackeray illustrates an essay on this 
much-abused king, with a threefold caricature which represents 
Rex—a dummy figure in robes: Ludovicus—a poor plain 
diminutive discontented Louis, with bald head and low shoes, 
pot-bellied and knock-kneed: and Ludovicus Rex—that same 
Louis in the kingly robes with high heels and towering wig. 


44 


mareeGARITGATURE (OR BIGOTRY 


Dotted lines across the page draw spiteful attention to the 
comparative heights. 

Well, at least Louis XIV encouraged literature and the arts, 
and his name is associated with some very lovely walnut-wood 
furniture. 


SY 


Caricatures by Leonardo da Vinci 
(from Die Karikatur der Europaischen Vélker, by Eduard Fuchs) 


Chapter V 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


art had a hold upon our imagination, we both encouraged it 

and deserved that encouragement: and the century which, 
from that point of view, began with some indifferent prints 
satirizing the trial of Doctor Sacheverell in 1710, ended in an 
orgy of caricature, poured out with Rabelaisian effusion, in the 
midst of torrential laughter. Religion, in fact, ceased to be the 
only subject for caricature, and though sectarian squabbles have 
persisted in pictorial commentary in some sort to the present 
day, as time went forward we see less and less of them and more 
and more of quarrels and persuasions, absurdities and enthu- 
siasms which are secular. 

As has been shown, though caricature of a kind did exist in 
fact from the remotest times, its recognition as a special form of 
art with a name of its own is comparatively recent. Indeed, 
during the Sacheverell trial the Tories believed that caricature 
had only just been imported from Holland, which country was 
then famous for its engravers as well as designers. 

“ Young man,” said Sarah Duchess of Marlborough to 
George Bubb Doddington (afterwards Lord Melcombe and the 
defender of Admiral Byng), when he was introduced to her at 
Brussels. ‘“ Young man, you come from Italy. They tell me of a 
new invention there called caricatura drawing. Can you find me 
somebody that will make me a caricatura of Lady Masham, 
describing her covered with running sores and ulcers, that I may 
send to the Queen to give her a slight idea of her favourite? ” 

This was in 1710, when Sarah had been ousted from royal 
favour and supplanted by the other lady. 


46 


|: in England we were slow in adopting caricature, once the 


PperlGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


Many years later the poet Gray writes to his friend John 
Chute in Florence: “* The wit of the times consists in satirical 
prints; I believe there have been some hundreds within this 
month. If you have any hopeful young designer of caricaturas 
that has a political turn, he may pick up a pretty subsistence here; 
let him pass through Holland to improve his taste by the way.” 

In Italy Stefano della Bella, whom the French called Etienne 
de la Belle, and who had been born in Florence at the beginning 
of the previous century, had, like Callot, studied under Canta 
Gallina, and had so imitated Callot that their works are often 
confused. He is said to have etched not less than fourteen hun- 
dred plates. He made a great reputation and when he visited 
Paris he was employed by Cardinal de Richelieu to make 
drawings of the siege and capture of Arras and La Rochelle. In 
1646 he published a series of eighteen prints called Raccolta d 
vari capriccit, which proves his fidelity even to Callot’s titles. 
He also made a series of sixteen small square plates which 
are often attributed to Callot. It was della Bella no doubt who 
inspired a school of caricature which was actually Italian. 

Romeyn de Hooghe in Holland established a school of 
drawing at Haarlem and enjoyed the patronage of our William 
III, and through his agency much caricature came to England: 
and our own first great painter, William Hogarth, copied, in 
his youth, many Dutch prints or adapted them for publica- 
tion in England. Though more often satirical than not, he was 
only a caricaturist on occasion. The faces and figures in his 
congregations and crowds are often exaggerated with a view to 
being amusing or repulsive, and in an age which did produce 
true caricature scarcely warrant inclusion. Hogarth on one 
occasion, however, made a plate called Characters and Carica- 
turas, to illustrate the difference, as he saw it; and though here 
and there in over a hundred heads the distinction is not easy to 
perceive, the plate is worth careful study. In the margin beneath 
it occur various other heads and faces, including that of Gio- 
vanna (as I have called her) by Leonardo da Vinci. Amedeo is 
omitted. 


47 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


No doubt the lessons he learned from the Dutch and his own 
inclination bent his mind towards the genre for which he was 
most famous. His portrait, however, of Simon Lord Lovat in 
1746 certainly contains a strong element of caricature, whilst in 
that of John Wilkes, made the year before he died, the wig of that 
dissolute wit is drawn so as to suggest the growth of devil’s horns, 
and the expression, with violently squinting eyes, is fiendishly 
derisive. This without any gross exaggeration is pure caricature. 

Hogarth is supposed to have invented the trick, still so 
favoured by boys of all ages, of drawing a trooper and his dog 
going through a doorway—in three strokes. In 1753 he made a 
most ingenious picture demonstrating every conceivable error 
in perspective. It is a marvel of ingenuity and, though not 
caricature, would only have been attempted by a man who had 
a childlike love of nonsense which is so important an ingredient 
in the art. It is also probable that he made the drawing in order 
to teach students some of the pitfalls of their craft. 

When a topic, foolish or otherwise, runs away with people, 
as we say, so that nothing else is talked about by high or low: 
so that intelligent folk utter platitudes about it, and foolish 
people look forward to the morrow’s newspaper: so that it gives 
point to catchwords, essence to songs, and kernel to jokes, we 
may be quite sure that its central figure will not lack the attention 
of the caricaturist. 

Such a topic was formed by the machinations of John Law, 
and the series of schemes with which he is associated. The 
Bubbles, South Sea and otherwise, “‘ ran away with” people 
not merely in England and France but everywhere, and it is 
doubtful if there has ever been a craze like that one, regarded 
only as a matter of common discussion. Since then robberies, 
murders, and cinematograph actresses had their share of popular 
attention, rather more perhaps than a fair share, and people have 
been idiotic about them and (relatively) similar concerns, and 
will go on being idiotic, but no whim nor fatuity has ever yet 


matched that stirred out of men’s idleness and empty-headed- 
ness by the Bubbles. 


48 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


John Law, the son of a Scottish goldsmith-banker, bred to 
a practical knowledge of finance, unhampered by a conscience, 
and fortified to a wonderful degree with impudence, the gift of 
talking, charm of manner, and fine presence, with riches too at 
his command, ingratiated himself with the French Regent. In 
the financial chaos of the country during the end of and following 
the reign of Louis XIV, any suggestion for raising funds and 
relieving the debt was welcome. Law came forward with a 
system, with a series of systems. There is no need to describe 


_ them. For nearly a year these systems worked. Then suspicion, 


followed hard by certainty, caused holders of stock to seek for 
realization. There was a rush, and frantic disillusionment. Jean 
Lass, as he was called in Paris, speech with whom had been 
social apotheosis, honoured by the Regent, and pursued by all 
the court, escaped not without difficulty from the French capital 
at the end of 1720; and, long outlawed from England for having 
broken the prison in which he had been confined on account of 
a questionable duel, he was forced to eke out the remaining 
eight years of his life as a polite gambler in Germany and Italy— 
which at face value seems to be a far pleasanter way of passing 
the time than in what is nowadays called Big Business. 

Naturally, he was caricatured: naturally his schemes and 
systems were the subjects of innumerable “ cartoons”. You see 
him, as Amsterdam saw him, a loathesomely ugly dwarf, which 
he was not, hawking his wares with a magic lantern slung on his 
back, and a walking-stick on the head of which is a windmill. 
Wind, reasonably enough, figured largely in these caricatures. 
Law is made to resemble Don Quixote, riding Sancho Panza’s 
donkey. The animal is loaded with gold coin in a box and in 
bags slung round his neck. Everywhere paper is scattered by the 
breeze, and the rider carries a banner on which is inscribed “ I 
come, I come, Dulcinea”’. 

In another satire of that time Folly drives the chariot of 
Fortune, to which are harnessed figures with foxes’ brushes, 
representing the Bubble companies. Fortune scatters paper to 
the crowd, and the Devil in the clouds blows soap-bubbles. 


49 . 


AYtHIS TORY (ORVCARIC AT One 


In the reign of George II, before English talent had widely 
developed, a number of foreigners were regularly employed by 
the sellers of prints, who took a pride in buying plates from 
beggarly artists for little more than their melting value as 
copper. 

With the rise to long-lived power of Sir Robert Walpole 
political caricaturists on both sides were extremely active; or, to 
be more exactly within the limits of the definition set down— 
political “* cartoonists ’’: of true caricature of the best kind there 
was little till the end of the century. Many artists lent their hands 
to political absurdity and the list of their names and works is an 
imposing one; but when examined in detail, we find nearly all 
the satire in the situation and not in the personal exaggeration. 
Clothes and attitudes, it is true, were often burlesqued, but the 
faces and figures of people whom the artist regarded or was paid 
to regard sympathetically were merely portrayed. Those of the 
enemy were made ugly: that was enough. In fact, caricaturists 
were content with, or were presumably unable to conceive 
anything but, what was obvious. Subtlety of perception is not 
always accompanied by the ability to record it; but the per- 
ceiving eye can to some extent force the hand, though the utmost 
skill of hand can never supply a lack of profundity of judgment. 
And while unskilled hands which could point a joke found 
employment—William Hanlon’s, for example, whose drawings 


though interesting were often “ messy” and incompetent— — 


they were not of the kind which falter under inspiration. With 
certain exceptions to be mentioned high technical skill was 
likewise uninspired. 

Caricature became too the hobby of amateurs, as it has been 
almost ever since. The Italian opera gave almost as many oppor- 
tunities for ridicule as did the passions and politics of the day, 
and the Countess of Burlington, whose husband built Burlington 
House, made caricatures of Farinelli, the singer in opera and of 
Heidegger, the manager. General (afterwards, Marquess) Town- 
send was another amateur. The most celebrated ‘‘ amateur ”’ of 


the eighteenth century (though his status in the narrow and ° 


50 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


sporting sense of that ill-used word may be called in question) 
was Henry William Bunbury, who lived from 1750 to 1811, and 
was an almost exact contemporary of Gillray. He was equerry to 
the Duke of York and his position gave him an obvious advantage 
for the exercise of his talent. 

Caricatures at this period were reproduced in all manner of 
ways, even upon ladies’ fans, indicating the intense interest 
taken by women in politics. A contemporary rhyme expresses a 
view of their activities not entirely obsolete at the present day. 
It is quoted from memory. 


If women sat in Parliament— 

A thing unprecedented— 

The great part of our nation, then, 
Would be Miss-represented. 


Shops were entirely devoted to the sale of caricature, and in 
more than one drawing of that century a print-shop is used as 
a convenient background for any street scene: while, in 1808 
Gillray made a drawing of an old gentleman slipping and falling 
on the pavement outside Humphreys’ shop at 27 St. James’s 
Street. In the window are seen a number of his own caricatures, 
including rough suggestions of two or three which are well- 
known to collectors at the present day and are easily recognizable. 

In the early part of the eighteenth century the word carica- 
tura was little used, and satirical drawings of that kind were 
called hieroglyphics, largely because their precise meaning was 
not always immediately plain. In despite of the many charges 
that have been brought against the English of obviousness in all 
matters concerned with art we have, as a matter of fact, always 
delighted in a little mystery, meanings that at the first glance 
are hidden, and a most admirable allusiveness in style. A volume 
of seventy-five political caricatures entitled A Political and 
Satirical History of the Year 1756 and 1757 was published in the 
latter of these. It was described as ‘‘ A series of humorous and 
entertaining prints, containing all the most remarkable Trans- 


51 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


actions, Characters, and Caricatures of these two Memorable 
Years”’. These were published from the shop of Darly and Ed- 
wards, at the Acorn, facing Hungerford, Strand. 

During the first part of George III’s reign, by favour of the 
Prince of Wales, Lord Bute and Henry Fox, afterwards Lord 
Holland, were the most prominent members of the Court, and 
as such became natural targets for the shafts of contemporary 
satire. Some of the caricatures directed against them, judged by 
the finest standards, are a little coarse. The harmless ones gave 
Lord Bute an enormous boot and a petticoat as an emblem of 
influence. Prints appeared, illustrating processions in which a 
Scotsman always figured, carrying a banner, bearing the signs 
of a boot and petticoat. Bute retaliated by employing Hogarth 
to draw satires in the opposing interest, and the artist received, 
it is said, a pension for so doing. Hogarth’s transactions in this 
regard becoming known, a lampoon was invented which con- 
sisted of a letter from Mr. Hog-garth to Lord Mucklemon, and 
his lordship’s reply. 


“ My Lord,— 


The enclosed is a design I intend to publish; you are sensible 
it will not redound to your honour, as it will expose you to all 
the world in your proper colours. You likewise know what 
induced me to do this; but it is in yt power to prevent it from 
appearing in publick, which I would have you do immediately. 


Will™, Hog-garth.” 


‘‘ Maist,—By my saul, mon, I am sare troobled for what I 
have done; I didna ken y* muckle merit till noow; say na mair 
aboot it; I’ll mak au things easy to you, and gie you bock your 
Pension. 


Sawney Mucklemon.”’ 


The comic rendering of Scots speech was about as good then 
as it is the noo. 


52 


MEP EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


Malcolm observes that Hogarth “‘ seldom indulged in carica- 
ture beyond the limits which Nature assigns when she thinks fit 
to be capricious”’. This is really a little less than the fact. Ho- 
garth certainly pointed the way to true caricature if he did not 
very often practise the art. 

Our national proclivity for repeating jokes, or over a long 
period for finding humour in the same subject, can be easily 
discovered by a reference to the old files and to the new ones 
of such a paper as Punch. But we can go further than that, a full 
century further back: Punch only began his career as a paper in 
1841. An essay in the Spectator or the Tatler of the mid-eigh- 
teenth century might, so far as subject and the writer’s attitude 
towards it goes, frequently have been written at the present time. 
It is part of the great pleasure to be gained from reading the 
eighteenth-century essayists to find how unchanging is human 
nature, how “‘ modern ” was the outlook of Johnson, of Addison 
and the rest. 

In 1913 Max Beerbohm exhibited a caricature of (then) 
Colonel Seely in the reading-room of the Cavalry Club, pointing 
to the card on the mantelshelf on which is written SILENCE. About 
him plethoric old generals are represented as upon the verge of 
apoplexy, shouting with rage and shaking their newspapers. This 
caricature set out to emphasize the attitude of the regular Army 
towards the Territorials. Go further back and you will find that 
the Volunteers were satirized in analogous ways in the ’sixties. 
And then go back to 1731, and in Read’s Weekly Fournal in 
September of that year you will find that the City Trained 
Bands, the municipal troops of the City of London, irregulars 
who had served with distinction down to the seventeenth cen- 
tury, but who had now deteriorated, are the objects of quite 
savage ridicule. 


“On Tuesday,” we read, “ the Cripplegate, Whitechapel, 
St. Clement’s, and Southwark Grenadiers rendezvous’d in 
Bridgewater Gardens: from whence they marched through the 
City, and afterwards attacked Cripplegate, both posterns, and 


53 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


Great Moorgate, with their usual bravery, and thence proceeded 
to attack a dunghill near Bunhill Fields, which gloriously com- 
pleted their exercise of arms.”’ 


These observations accompany a caricature, showing various 
animals in uniform: a monkey, an elephant ‘in a wig (whose head, 
by the way, is reproduced by Malcolm in his Historical Sketch), 
carrying a spear ; an ox, and a drummer-monkey, leading the rank 
and file, who are also monkeys. The ox carries a banner with 
roast beef and a plum-pudding delineated upon it. They are 
drawn up outside the ‘‘Hog in Armour ” : and a monkey in the 
foreground holds a bill on which is written: 


Come, taylers and weavers, 
And sly penny shavers, 

All haste and repair, 

To the Hog in Rag Fair, 
To ‘list in the pay 

Of great Captain Day, 
And you shall have cheer, 
Beef, pudding, and beer. 


During the eighteenth century and for a decade or so of the 
nineteenth the history of caricature follows the political history 
of Europe, though, to be sure, aspects of life other than political 
or “ historical ’’ have usually produced the best satires because 
the best artists have, as a rule, been somewhat indifferent to party 
politics and have been more concerned with wider tendencies. 
And the best caricatures of all have been of individuals whose 
faces, figures, clothes and bearing have told their own story, and 
not of groups of people “doing things”. It is easier to get an 
effect, especially a “* popular ” effect, by crowding a drawing with 
accessories—" John Bull taking a luncheon ” of battleships, or 
Napoleon, surrounded by his marshals, staring in fright towards 
the Writing on the Wall,—as Gillray did, than it is by making 
the solitary caricature of the Czar Paul of Russia, as he also did 


54 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


on another occasion, or as Pellegrini did with single personalities 
for twenty years in Vanity Fair. 

The great names of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth 
centuries were those of Gillray and Rowlandson, whose work 
has been extensively and exhaustively described by several 
writers, though not always from quite the same angle. Mr. 
Everitt is, for example, quite overcome by the “‘ coarseness ” of 
Gillray and Rowlandson. He complains that George Cruikshank, 
his especial hero, displayed, from time to time at the outset of 
his career, signs of this coarseness which are “ directly traceable 
to the influence of Rowlandson”’, whose shortcomings in that 
respect were particularly marked. Grego, on the other hand, 
declares that Rowlandson was ‘“‘ master of the most elegant 
refinement, both of delineation and colouring, and produced 
the most delicious female heads, with that brightness and 
daintiness of touch, which was his peculiar gift, bringing all the 
graces, sparkle and animation of the French school to bear upon 
the models of winsome female beauty ”. But even he adds, “ we 
are constrained to admit . . . that too many of his productions 
are strongly tinctured with that coarseness of subject and senti- 
ment which has been held to disfigure the works of contemporary 
humorists: his wit . . . was of the jocose school of Smollett 
and Fielding, and in justice it must be taken into consideration 
that his designs, even in their most uncompromising and grosser 
aspects, simply reflect the colour of a period which was the 
reverse of squeamish... . ” 

That is fair enough, but Everitt and others do not give that 
merry devil his due. 

Much of the humour of that era was of the kind that we 
associate with small boys in the lower forms of schools and with 
that vague generic term, the “smoking-room”’. Our present mode 
of civilization has proscribed that kind of humour in print or 
picture, but so far it has failed to eradicate it from the aural 
tradition. Without the slightest desire either to palliate or to 
impeach any kind of impropriety, it must in justice be pointed 
out that while it used to be printed and accepted, by word of 


55 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


mouth it is still accepted and persists. When coarse humour has 
ceased to be generally accepted and chuckled over in private, 
then the public uplifting of pious hands in horror at the brutalities 
of the eighteenth century may be defended. 


Mask of Charles X of France 
By Charles Philipon 


Chapter VI 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


(continued) 


year before Gillray, in 1756, and he survived that artist, 

with whom his name is so often and so unconscionably 
coupled, twelve years, dying in 1827. He began as a serious 
painter in water-colour, occasionally making portraits in oils, 
and he exhibited in the Royal Academy, where his work was 
regularly hung. He composed too a book of etchings, not copies 
of other men’s work, but done in various styles, so that he seems 
to have got into the very skins of other artists. This knack of 
parody, satirical or otherwise, is a marked characteristic of the 
mind which finds delight at some time or another in caricature. 
In 1774 Rowlandson ceased from sending his portraits to the 
Academy and sent instead drawings such as those in which he 
describes Vauxhall Gardens, where extreme daintiness and re- 
finement are a great deal more evident than humour. 

To-day we realize that Grego’s apologies for Rowlandson in 
his capacity of satirist are rather beside the point. His exquisite 
draughtsmanship and the elegance with which all his subjects 
—even the coarse ones—were conceived and carried out, are 
widely appreciated. A water-colour drawing which shows some 
drunken old reprobate in the act of being sick after blowing 
kisses, as one might say, to Bacchus, does not suggest beauty. 
But beauty is there, if only in the treatment which compensates 
the subject. His landscapes and military scenes, in camp and 
field, are as devoid of coarseness as violets in the hedgerow. He 
was a landscape painter, indeed, of great distinction; his trees 
which were done to some extent after the convention of the time 


57 


TT ver tet ROWLANDSON was born in London, a 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


yet nevertheless invariably show individual qualities of their own. 
His use of blue and red is a joy of connoisseurs, his architectural 
sense in the treatment of houses was precise and scholarly. His 
interiors were filled but not over-filled with decorative detail 
which always refreshes the eye. 

If he felt that a subject warranted that particular form of 
comment he would be coarse enough to indicate his meaning. 
The etching that he made of the Boxing Match* between Ward 
and Quirk in 1812 is quite evidently the expression of his 
opinion of the noble art. Gross beasts are pounding each other, 
their faces distorted with anger, their attitudes quite unsug- 
gestive of science. ‘The onlookers, held back by no rope such as 
would in fact have kept them from the ring, are meant no doubt 
to be typical of the ordinary crowd at a prize fight. That they 
remain typical of the crowd at a modern boxing match says as 
much for Rowlandson’s perceptions as it does for the collateral 
unsavouriness of the Ring to-day. 

He seldom practised true caricature, but instances do occur 
here and there amongst his personal satires. There was a series 
known as the Delicate Investigation, which made fun of the 
scandal involving the Duke of York and Mrs. Mary Anne 
Clarke, a lady of more brains than virtue, whose activities in and 
out of the law courts formed one of the causes célébres at the 
beginning of the last century. In the illustration in this book 
made from an original water-colour drawing the caricaturish 
element is probably slight and subtle: sometimes it was broader. 
No doubt its implications are highly scandalous. 

Living in Wardour Street as he did from 1777 to 1781, 
Rowlandson had a wide knowledge of the world of Pleasure: 
he was a popular and genial personality, as his self-portrait 
very readily tells us. He had the wide eye, the good nose and 
sensitive mouth, one of which features at least is usually to 
be found in men who understood the art of being worldly and 
at the same time of enjoying its practice. He was a desperate 


* This etching, with notes regarding the curious mistakes both in names and 
dates which it records, is reproduced in The Prize Ring (Country Life), 1925. 


58 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


gambler and is said upon one occasion to have sat for thirty-six 
hours at a stretch at the card table. As a lad, he had been to the 
same school—Dr. Barrow’s Academy in Soho Square—with 
Henry Angelo, who went thence to Eton, and who shared rooms 
at No. 13 Old Bond Street with John Jackson the pugilist 
champion of England. 

In Rowlandson’s day the principal print-sellers were Fores, 
Tegg, and Ackermann, besides Mrs. Humphreys. The first and 
third of these are still represented by members of their respective 
families in Piccadilly and Regent Street at the present day. 
Rowlandson found an especially good friend in the Mr. Acker- 
mann of 1800. He was apt to lose all his money at the card 
table, but without regrets he would hold up his reed pen and 
assure his friends that it would soon produce more pelf. 

Rowlandson was used to strengthening his outlines with a 
mixture of vermilion and indian ink. The tint of his pen line is 
therefore distinctive without being unique: and yet such is the 
stupidity of modern forgers (and since original Rowlandsons have 
become valuable in the market, there are many) that they use 
plain indian ink, sometimes without even taking the trouble to 
dilute it, in making their spurious drawings. This and Rowland- 
son’s own very infrequent use of large spaces of yellow are two 
points, apart from the general character and manner of drawing, 
for the collector to bear in mind. One rather notorious “ adapter”’ 
of Rowlandson, who was also one of his biographers, was ex- 
tremely apt to give himself away by introducing into pictures 
large patches of a brightish yellow. Generally, however, pictures 
by a master of Rowlandson’s measure proclaim their authenticity 
by the treatment of line and composition. Moreover, the forgers 
are fond of signing their pictures (to increase the value)—a thing 
that Rowlandson very seldom did. 

James Gillray was born in 1757 and worked as a lad as a 
letter engraver. The monotony of this labour, however, induced 
him to run away with a company of strolling players, in much 
the same way as Callot had done nearly two hundred years 
before. Creative artists have not seldom shown a disposition to 


59 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


prefer vagabondage to the bondage of spirit which is inseparable 
from dull, unpromising, and settled occupations. The desire to 
roam and to be a rolling stone is yet not to be regarded as the 
measure of talent. 

Gillray had a quite genuine love of drawing which almost 
amounted to genius. “ This coarseness and vulgarity,” Everitt 
says of him, ‘‘ may be said to be rather the exception than the 
rule, whereas the exact contrary holds good of his able and too 
often careless contemporary ”—that is Rowlandson. Leaving 
subject out of the question Gillray’s technique, vigorous and 
masculine, suggests that quality (which writers of the later 
nineteenth century found so deplorable) far more strongly than 
does Rowlandson’s. There was nothing pretty-pretty about 
Gillray’s work and—not that personal character is any too surely 
indicated by a man’s work, or at all events not obviously in- 
dicated—James Gillray was a drunkard and a raffish fellow who 
descended, as drunkards do, to the most reprehensible tricks in 
order to supply funds to spend in taverns. In a miniature 
portrait, painted by himself, we seem to see a heavy-eyed weari- 
ness, almost despair, which ill accords with the vigour and high 
spirits of his work. Here, in the portrait, is a man of great 
intellect, but no illusions. It is a sad face. 

For a long time he lived in the house of Mrs. Humphreys the 
print-seller of Old and New Bond Streets, before she moved to 
St. James’s Street. He had contracted with her not to sell his 
work elsewhere, but it is known that, in order to raise a little 
extra money, he disguised his name and manner of drawing on 
various occasions and etched plates for Fores of Piccadilly. Some 
of his work is signed—J. Hurd, some—J. Kent, and—J. Penn. 
In his earliest plates, the scrupulous care of the practised en- 
graver is manifest to the detriment of freedom and spontaneity. 
Later on his work as a student at the Royal Academy enabled 
him to throw off these shackles and to maintain a line which 
shows little sign of being cramped. Upwards of twelve hundred 
caricatures and satires are known to have been made by him, 
the best known being concerned with Napoleon Buonaparte and 


60 


Mire hIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


Josephine, whom, as is generally conceded, he treated pictorially 
with the grossest possible injustice. We have John Bull holding 
up the dripping severed head of Napoleon on a pitchfork: this 
indicating what would happen if he invaded England. 


“Ha! my little Boney! What do’st think of Johnny Bull 
now? Plunder Old England, hay? Make French slaves of us all, 
hay? Ravish all our wives and daughters, hay? O, Lord help that 
silly head! To think that Johnny Bull would ever suffer those 
lanthorn jaws to become king of Old England’s Roast Beef and 
Plum Pudding! ” 


The meaning of this last sentence seems a little difficult to 
catch. The ‘‘ hay ” is no doubt aimed at George III who was 
always represented as using that form of interrogation in every 
sentence that he uttered. 

“Hay? Hay?” says the old king, under a caricature, de- 
signed to perpetuate the memory of an ancient joke against him. 
He is looking into a telescope through an open window at an 
old woman making apple dumplings. “‘ Hay? Hay? Apple 
dumplings ?—How get the apples in?—How? Are they made 
without seams? ” 

Another drawing is an amusing but extremely cruel carica- 
ture of the same monarch, reaching up to whose arm is a dwarf- 
like, hideous little woman, intended to be the Queen. This is 
called “‘ Royal Affability””, the object of that affability, hat in 
hand, being about to feed pigs. 

‘Well, friend, where a’ you going, hay? What’s your name, 
hay? Where do you live, hay ?—hay?” 

Gillray burlesqued the French Revolution: he dealt with 
new fashions as they arose, but his exaggerations were mainly 
confined to expression, clothes, and postures, and did not 
include to any marked extent the facial peculiarities. 

An excellent drawing by Gillray, published in 1796, most 
copies of which, however, are greatly spoiled by being clumsily 
and tastelessly daubed with water-colour, is called “ A Peep at 


61 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


Christie’s, or Tally-ho and his Nimeney-Pimeney Taking the 
Morning Lounge: a study of Lord Derby and Miss Farren (the 
Actress), a few months before their marriage enjoying the Fine 
Arts, he studying the Death of Reynard, she Zenocrates and 
Phryne.” 

In the background a lady wears a hat with a feather of the 
period exaggerated to about the size of her body, standing with 
some other people whose costumes are somewhat less eccentric. 
The main interest of the print lies in the tall thin figure of the 
actress standing beside an absurd tubby dwarf, with an enor- 
mous bulging forehead, a nondescript hat loosely set upon it, 
spurs, and a crop. Each holds a catalogue and stares at the 
respective choice. 

In the same year Gillray found an opportunity in a remark 
of Lord Kenyon, for satirizing two women of fashion. Mrs. 
Hobart (afterwards Lady Buckinghamshire) and Lady Archer 
were notorious not only for playing for high stakes, but for 
inveigling reckless young men into their houses with that end 
in view, and fleecing them. Kenyon, in the Court of King’s 
Bench, hearing a peculiarly flagrant case which arose from these 
ladies’ play, observed that he wished women in no matter what 
position could, for keeping gambling houses, be put in the pillory. 

In those days there would be no delicate restraint from with- 
in, nor public opinion pressing from without to keep Gillray 
from publishing “‘ The Exaltation of Faro’s Daughters”, which 
was to be the cure for that type of gambling as prescribed by the 
Lord Chief Justice. The two ladies in question are seen with 
their necks encircled, looking out from the rough boards of the 
pillory, beneath which is pinned a paper bearing Lord Kenyon’s 
observations. Another caricature was published in that same 
year, 1796, by Isaac Cruikshank, the father of George, drawn on 
almost exactly the same lines except that it includes the figure of 
the learned judge in the foreground. This print is entitled 
“‘ Cocking the Greeks ’’. 

In personal caricatures Gillray made conspicuous successes of 
Grattan, Shelburne, and ‘‘ Tommy Paine, the American Tailor”’. 


62 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


George Moutard Woodward, for whom Rowlandson en- 
graved some plates, also made a considerable name at this 
period, his earliest work appearing in 1792. He was less fortunate 
than the others, dying in destitution seventeen years later. 'T'wo 
years before his death, however, he initiated The Caricature 
Magazine, which achieved a certain success. 

William Heath excelled in his caricatures of fashion, which 
he signed P. Pry: and James Sayer also made a name for himself, 
and being under the patronage of Pitt his treatment of Charles 
James Fox will readily be imagined. The savagery with which 
Fox was caricatured is scarcely equalled by the treatment meted 
out even to Napoleon. This is probably due to the fact that a 
fellow-countryman is instinctively abler to find the really open 
joint in the armour. It is easy to call the general commanding 
enemy troops “ Boney the Carcase Butcher’, and to make a 
drawing to match: such a drawing would enjoy the certainty of 
popular acceptance, just as in recent times similar (but less 
skilful) satires upon the ex-Emperor Wilhelm have delighted 
thousands of people to whom that vain, unwise, and disappointed 
man was a symbol of brutal enmity. 

People in general could know little more of the Kaiser than 
they did of Napoleon Buonaparte—that little being supplied by 
infrequent appearances in this country, for friendly or for 
practical purposes, such as Boney never made. But Charles 
James Fox could always be seen and not infrequently heard: and 
he could be interpreted, or misinterpreted, to the populace with 
shrewder venom and real insight. 

In this book will be found a caricature “ Billy’s Political 
Plaything ” in which Pitt is seen with whip held high about to 
beat the severed head of his opponent on a spinning top. This 
drawing is a little ferocious, but a most admirable piece of 
designing. The caricature was made by Richard Newton, who 
lived only from 1777 to 1798, and in his short career made 
caricatures and satirical drawings which, few as they are, should 
be better known. He was also a painter of portraits in miniature. 
Another caricature by him on the fashion prevalent in 1795 is 


63 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


called “ The Rage”. A lady is represented in the then new 
Directoire style of dress, seen from in front and from behind. 
Beneath the drawing is the rhyme: 


Shepherds, I have lost my waist! 
Have you seen my body? 
Sacrificed to modern taste, 

I’m quite a Hoddy-Doddy. 


To return for a moment to “ Billy’s Political Plaything ” it 
should be added that the caricature, at all events that copy of it 
preserved in the Print Room of the British Museum, is most 
delightfully coloured, with a simplicity, taste, and clarity which 
is extremely uncommon in the hand-colouring of the etchings 
and engravings of that time. 

In 1810, a Fashion-caricature was made and called ‘“‘ The 
Invisibles”’, showing women whose faces were entirely hidden 
by bonnet and frills: men who could perhaps just see out be- 
neath their hats, and over their high stocks. It is interesting to 
compare this convention with one of Max Beerbohm, who in 
successive caricatures of Lord Spencer, over a number of years, 
made his collar higher and higher until at length you see his 
eyes, glancing kindly and gravely out through two round holes 
in a starchy pillar. Dandy was the name in current use for an 
exquisitely dressed man about the year 1819: well-dressed and 
over-dressed women were called Dandizettes. 

The Hobby-horse, the forerunner of the bicycle, became at 
this time a fashionable mania; and we see the Duke of York, 
who was Commander-in-Chief, and also, for reasons which 
to-day we should regard as insufficient, Prince-Bishop of Osna- 
burg, riding one. There had been considerable outcry against 
the enormity of the Civil List, a decent proportion of which was 
ear-marked for H.R.H. He nevertheless led the van in calling 
for economy and here we see him tearing along the road to 
Windsor on his hobby in order to save the expense of a stable. 
John Bull apostrophizes him: 


64 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


“ Dang it, Mr. Bishop, thee art saving, indeed; thee used to 
ride in a coach and six: now I pay thee ten thousand pounds a 
year more, thee art riding a wooden horse for all the world like 
a gate-post.”’ 


A few years before, Vansittart had introduced a tax on soap, 
so that we got a drawing the scene of which is a washhouse, 
where the figure of that minister jumps out of a frothing tub to 
the amazement of the washerwoman. 


“ Here I am, Betty; ”’ he says, ‘‘ How are you off for suds? ” 
“Lord, Mr. Vansittart! who could have thought of seeing 
you in the washing-tub? ”’ 


Francis Grose, whose work was referred to in the first chapter 
of this one, lived from about 1731 to 1791. He was the son of 
an Irish jeweller, and was elected a member of the Society of 
Artists, held the rank of captain in the Surrey Militia, and the 
post of Richmond Herald. He goes down to fame almost every 
day, if one of his own national bulls be permitted, without being 
mentioned by name, for he was “the chiel amang us takin’ 
notes ’’ of Robert Burns. He made a portrait of himself with a 
good deal of obvious caricature in it, leaning on a twisted stick, 
with a face and figure that scarcely belie his name. 

George Cruikshank is another artist who has been copiously 
discussed and whose work as a caricaturist is somewhat over- 
shadowed by his better-known and nowadays more popular 
work as an illustrator of books. In his youth he finished some of 
Gillray’s plates for him, when that unfortunate genius went off 
his head in 1811. Thackeray in his critical essay on him in the 
Westminster Review for June, 1840, speaks of him as the champion 
of woman: who had an honest, hearty hatred for everyone who 
abused her. For example, Cruikshank took the princess’s part 
against the Regent. Indeed, it may be said, quite rightly, that 
most of the more distinguished caricaturists have been of the 
Whiggish persuasion. 


65 F 


A HISTORY OF CARIGCAT GORE 


“ Canning, Castlereagh, Bexley, Sidmouth, he is at them, one 
and all; and as for the Prince, up to what a whipping-post of 
ridicule did he tie that unfortunate old man! And do not let 
squeamish Tories cry out about disloyalty; if the Crown does 
wrong, the Crown must be corrected by the nation, out of 
respect, of course, for the Crown. In those days and by those 
people who so bitterly attacked the son, no word was ever 
breathed against the father, simply because he was a good 
husband, and a sober, thrifty, pious, orderly man.” 


It is doubtful whether any simple thrift, piety or sobriety 
would really have broken the pencil point of the ferocious 
satirists of that day, but the old King’s infirmities might have 
done so; and probably when they had done with the Regent 
they had no time for anyone else. 

Cruikshank’s work between 1811 and 1815 appeared in 
periodicals, called respectively The Scourge and The Satirist ; 
or Monthly Meteor. The Scourge was edited by one Jack Mitford, 
a man of education who had fought in the Navy under Nelson 
and Hood, and who edited besides The Bon Ton magazine, and 
The Quzzical Gazette. He was a loafer, a vagabond, and a 
drunkard. For one book of which he was the author his pub- 
lisher paid him a shilling a day till he had finished it. Mitford 
died in the workhouse.* 

Cruikshank contributed his quota to the satires regarding 
Napoleon. He directed a most pointed caricature at fohn Bull 
buying stones at the time his numerous family want bread. This 
refers to the indemnification by the Government of Lord Elgin 
for his much greater expenses in procuring the marbles from the 
frieze of the Parthenon at Athens. Like the others Cruikshank 
caricatured the fashions with grotesque exaggeration, both of 
garments male and female, as well as of faces and figures. So 
late as 1850 we find him making fun of crinolines so enormous 
that men are handing plates and glasses to women by means of 
long sticks on the ends of which are trays. 

* Everitt’s English Caricaturists. 


66 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN.ENGLAND 


Of Cruikshank’s drawings Philip Gilbert Hamerton writes in 
his Etching and Etchers : “ 'They are full of keen satire and happy 
invention, and their moral purpose is always good; but all these 
qualities are compatible with a carelessness of art, which is not 
to be tolerated in anyone but a professional caricaturist.”’ 

There lies implicit the later English attitude to caricature. 
Bah! The thing’s a caricature: it can be done as badly and as 
carelessly as you please. We must reserve our serious endeavours 
for the Royal Academy, for pictures of sea-shells in a be- 
ribboned basket, for the Sailor’s Return, the Soldier’s Farewell. 
Caricature must never be confused with Art; and it is such a 
pity that opportunities for such confusion should arise in the 
minds of uninstructed persons, because men like Cruikshank 
could draw a bit and displayed a good moral purpose. 

The one caricaturist of this period who devoted himself 
almost entirely to the face and form of current celebrities was 
Robert Dighton, who born about 1752 and who died in 1814. 
Many authorities refuse the name of caricaturist to Dighton, 
because, it must be presumed, he was the first artist of that kind 
to rely on a very slight exaggeration of salient peculiarities, and 
who introduced into that form of portraiture a good deal of 
subtlety. It is extremely doubtful whether we should feel im- 
pelled to say of, for example, the caricature reproduced in this 
book—“* 'That is the old Don incarnate: that is Oxford,” unless 
there was some element of over-statement. Most art, whether 
writing, or acting, or painting, is to some extent chargé. If it 
were not, there is always a question whether we should ever see 
the point: and Dighton whose unskilfulness seldom went further 
than a certain inability to draw a man’s hands, treated their 
faces, figures, and clothes with just that slight extravagance 
which the connoisseurs of caricature most keenly enjoy. 

He was in point of fact a portrait painter as well, and between 
1769 and 1773 he exhibited heads done in chalk at the Free 
Society of Arts. In 1775 he hung at the Royal Academy a 
number of what he called ‘‘ stain’d drawings’; and two years 
later—and this shows him without any doubt to have been of 


67 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


the genuinely caricaturish turn of mind—‘“ A Drawing of a 
Gentleman from Memory ”’. He seems to have lived all his life 
in London, and was the forerunner of some modern carica- 
turists in that he classified his subjects by occupation, running 
through the Bar, the Army, the Navy, Oxford and Cambridge, 
actors and actresses, and other groups. 

In 1795 he etched a Book of Heads, exhibiting a number of 
men in various walks of life. He signed his etchings R. Dighton, 
and Dighton. (His son, Richard, a lesser performer, signed in 
full.) Some years before his death it was discovered that he had 
removed some prints from the British Museum, a dealer, 
named Woodburn, giving evidence before the Trustees to the 
effect that he had bought a Rembrandt etching from the carica- 
turist. Dighton confessed his guilt and all the prints were 
returned. 

There is an unusually large collection of Dighton’s carica- 
tures to be seen in the rooms of Rule’s restaurant in Maiden 
Lane, near Covent Garden. 

After the first decade or so of the nineteenth century, we 
find that the polite school of Cruikshank in his later incarnation 
and of his followers coming after the fiercely masculine but 
sometimes brutal period of the Napoleonic wars, killed carica- 
ture and replaced it by Comic Art, into which was infused a little 
humane satire and a great deal of inanity. True caricature became 
very scarce and has so remained. John Doyle is referred to as 
“innocent and amusing”? when compared to the previous 
masters of “ savage vulgarity’’. In comic art of his sort there is 
little exaggeration, and as we have seen, caricature depends for 
its existence on that quality. Current humour lay more and more 
in the situation described. Richard Doyle and Robert Seymour, 
the illustrator of Pickwick practically never made caricatures. 
John Leech, in the early days of Punch, came occasionally within 
measurable distance, such as in his drawing of the Duke of 
Wellington and Prince de Joinville in 1845; and that of Earl 
Russell six years later. It is beside the strict point of the present 
purpose, but as du Maurier has been so often called a carica- 


68 


- 
ie 
7 


THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN ENGLAND 


turist it is worth while observing that his exaggeration of types— 
a very real and marked exaggeration—was due to no intention 
of his. He was an ardent and capable apostle of that sentimental 
creed which believes in the slight, agreeable falsehood; which 
has endeared him, not unnaturally, to a generation which could 
look almost anything bravely in the face except a fact. 


\ 


Rovetiy 2A. 


M. Maurice Barrés 
By André Rouveyre 


Chapter VII 


SRV AN EDY re Ae 


N Y HILE, as various writers have copiously pointed out, 

comic art in general became, after the first quarter of 

the nineteenth century, “refined” and only gently 

satirical, true caricature almost ceased to exist until Vanity 

Fair was founded by Thomas Gibson Bowles in 1868; and 

Vanity Fair, so long as the paper is remembered, will always be 

associated with the name of its most considerable regular contri- 

butor, the outstanding caricaturist of the Victorian era, Carlo 
Pellegrini. 

This brilliant but kindly satirist was born at Capua in 1839, 
being on the distaff side descended from the Medici family. As 
a young man he was much seen in Neapolitan society and his 
happy knack of making caricatures was much admired. He 
volunteered and fought with Garibaldi at Capua and Volturno. 
But, the path of true love being too rough for him, he left Italy 
for England in November 1864. Five years later he became a 
regular caricaturist employed constantly by Vanity Fair. He 
had done a certain amount of work over the signature Singe, but 
from his first connexion with Vanity Fair used the equivalent, 
now so familiar to us, Ape. In Forty Years of “ Spy’’, the late 
Sir Leslie Ward, the other caricaturist for so long attached to 
Vanity Fair, tells us how when he joined that paper he and 
Pellegrini for some time shared the task of making caricatures 
between them. 

The Italian was a small stout fastidious man, something of a 
dandy, who invariably wore white spats and immensely long 
finger-nails, like a Chinese mandarin. He and Spy became friends 
and the younger man tells us how his rival, never very strong, 


7° 


OVA PEIN A adetigh sig Ales gp 


probably debilitated himself by steadfastly refusing to walk any- 
where when he could take a cab. Amongst his odder accomplish- 
ments Pellegrini could lie in an armchair and hold a cigar in his 
mouth while he not only slept, but snored. 

As to method, Pellegrini, like others of his craft, would make 
as many preliminary sketches as might be required before he 
was satisfied. He would then make a tracing from the study 
which pleased him best. In this way he insured a firm and steady 
line such as could be well and clearly reproduced on a stone; 
but this must have mitigated very severely the spontaneity of the 
drawing. 

Ape’s first caricature in Vanity Fair was of Disraeli, whom 
he makes to look like a theatrical impresario. The following week 
he made one of Mr. Gladstone, who is unconscionably dour. 
During the next twenty years the caricatures in Vanity Fair were 
labelled for the most part Statesmen and Men of the Day. Ape 
drew almost entirely from memory, as does his great successor 
Max. He personally regarded as his most successful caricatures 
those of Baron Brunnow and of Lord Stanley, afterwards Earl 
of Derby. “ Brunnow” is indeed a magnificent design—a 
stoutish elderly gentleman, bald, with an enormous ear, and a 
huge slit of good-humoured mouth: the eyes are cunning, and 
the drawing as such, regarded just as a pattern upon papct, 
instantly catches the eye, and compels the attention. Of the 
Lord Stanley you say, as good caricatures so often call upon you 
to say, when you have no knowledge of the originals—* ‘That 
must be good ”—which simply means that the artist has put 
character into his drawing. In this case the stalwart shoulders 
are set back, lifting the coat right away from the shirt-collar. 
Exaggeration is manifest, but you know that an exaggeration of 
this sort is bound to be founded upon fact. The famous carica- 
ture of the Earl of Dudley with the long curled hair hiding his 
ears looks something between Beau Brummel and a spaniel. It 
is extremely interesting to perceive in a caricature also made in 
1869 of the then Lord Chelmsford a likeness to his living kins- 
man the artist-actor Mr. Ernest Thesiger. Dr. Frederick Quin, 


7p! 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


the famous homeeopathist, who on account of his conversion to 
that form of medical procedure, was most vigorously black- 
balled by the Atheneum Club, must have been, as we say, a 
caricature to start with. A man much liked, a favourite in society, 
Dr. Quin looks out of the caricature with minute widely set eyes, 
twinkling with good humour, a grotesquely upturned nose, and 
a mouth which stretches from ear to ear. It is one of those out- 
rageously ugly faces which positively attract you. Pellegrini may 
have made the man uglier than did nature, but he served him 
well. It would be impossible to think otherwise than with 
affection and trust of anyone who in such reliable hands could 
inspire such a portrait. 

In 1874 Vanity Fair published a singularly fine caricature of 
Algernon Charles Swinburne, with his aureole of red hair, his small 
queer beard, his prosaic clothes, his hands behind him and one foot 
kicking against the other. “ Before Sunrise ” is printed beneath 
the lithograph. For this drawing he made a study upon blotting- 
paper which had already been used for its ordinary purpose. A 
reproduction of this study, which is of considerable interest, 
appears among the illustrations here. The original piece of 
blotting-paper is the property of Mr. William Nicholson, who 
reproduced it in The Winter Owl* of 1923, and who has given 
me leave to use it again here. One of his most searching cari- 
catures was of General Gordon. This almost exactly complements 
Mr. Strachey’s account of that officer in Eminent Victorians. 

Ape hardly ever descended as did Spy to mere portraiture. 
Through the medium of exaggeration of one sort or another he 
always made his comment, was amusing, occasionally a little 
acid. He is said to have been invariably fair. 

Pellegrini was only fifty-three when he died in January of 
1889. The last drawing that he made was a caricature of Edison, 
the inventor. This was not published. 

In April of the same year a drawing of him signed by a 
hieroglyphic consisting of the letters A. J. M. and standing for 


* The Winter Owl. Edited by Robert Graves and William Nicholson. (Cecil 
Palmer.) 1923. 


72 


SIAN ITY FATRY 


Arthur J. Marks, appeared in Vanity Fair as the weekly carica- 
ture: and we see a good-humoured, fat little man with a bifurcated 
reddish-grey beard, a slight cast in his eye, the inevitable cigar, 
and the finger-nails. An admirable rough impression of Pelle- 
grini, emphasizing his gait, was made once by Degas. 

If he did not inspire Sir Leslie Ward, who in his reminis- 
cences rather heatedly denies that extremely soft impeachment, 
he has undoubtedly pointed the way to others. Max’s first book 
of caricatures was dedicated to his shade. 

Max himself contributed very little to Vanity Fair, his best- 
remembered drawing for that paper being one of George Mere- 
dith, with huge eyes and uplifted finger, seeming perhaps to 
listen to skylarks. 

Contemporaneous with Pellegrini, but surviving him for 
many years was Mr. (later Sir Leslie) Ward, who over the signa- 
ture of Spy, contributed to Vanity Fair from 1873 until just 
before the Great War, when the paper in its old form ceased to 
exist. In an article in an early number of Vanity Fair Spy was 
himself caricatured and Jehu Junior, who wrote the accompany- 
ing letterpress to all the plates, suggested that in years to come a 
wonderful book of reminiscences should await the public, 
when Ward looked back at the long career upon which he had 
just set out. In 1915 this book* was published not long before 
the author’s death. The pseudonym, he tells us, came when dis- 
cussing that quite important detail with Gibson Bowles. The 
editor handed him a dictionary and suggested that he should 
hunt up a name then and there. The dictionary opened at the 
s’s, and the matter was speedily settled. Of Spy’s work for 
Vanity Fair almost only the earliest can be called caricature at 
all. His first contribution in 1873 was “ Old Bones”’, which was 
the nickname given to Professor Owen. You see a huge hat, a 
rugged stick, untidy clothes. It is very like photographs of the 
old gentleman, but it suggests only good humour, and does not 
begin to hint at intellect. His Anthony Trollope of the same year 
was a good caricature as was the “‘ Abbé Liszt’ of 1886. But 

* Forty Years of ‘‘ Spy’’. By Leslie Ward. (Chatto and Windus.) 1915. 


75 


a) 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


gradually and, presumably owing to the portrait painting to which 
the artist gave more and more time as he grew older, the carica- 
turish element almost entirely departed from his work for 
Vanity Fair, until we get, in 1907, a perfectly plain, straight- 
forward, and quite uninspired likeness of (then Mr.) Chartres 
Biron, the magistrate. Referring to the caricature of Liszt, Sir 
Leslie Ward tells us in his book that Boehm made a bust of that 
great composer, and actually left out the warts which adorned 
his face. Spy is here discussing the propriety of dealing faith- 
fully with physical blemishes of that kind, which, as he rightly 
points out, are as essential to a man’s appearance, or at all events 
were in that instance, as his eyes and mouth. But that is one of 
the points which the public, not greatly caring for the art, is 
unable to understand. And there is an instance of the wife of a 
celebrity who begged a caricaturist to omit her husband’s 
smoked glasses without which, however, he was never seen. 
One of the most distinguished caricaturists of the years 
round about 1900 was an amateur, who, over the signature 
A—o, abbreviated from Armadillo, made a few contributions of 
outstanding excellence to Vanity Fair. One of them is to be found 
among the illustrations to this book. It is always a matter of deep 
regret to the enthusiastic student of the subject that so much 
brilliant work of this kind exists only in private collections. A—o 
was in private life the late Roland le Strange, the head, though 
only for the last few months of his life, of the ancient Norfolk 
family. He might very easily have made a great name for himself, 
for he had the technical ability to set down exactly what his 
perceiving eye took in. There was no trickery about his work, 
no wild exaggeration; but always he threw that little extra 
emphasis upon the outward physical signs of the inward and 
spiritual character, which is the subtlest form of caricature. He 


only made drawings when he wanted to and of people who — 


interested him—a personal friend or two, some jockeys, and so 
forth. The professional caricaturist, if he be regularly working 
for a paper, is handicapped in this regard: he is constantly being 
required to caricature notabilities of the moment for whom he 


14 


PN ARV Ok AL Ree 


can induce in himself no sort of interest; and his work suffers 
accordingly. The caricature reproduced here is of Admiral Sir 
Harry Keppel. It is called, simply, “ 94’; that being the age 
of the subject in October, 1903, when the drawing appeared in 
Vanity Fair. The original, from which the lithograph for that 
periodical was made, was given by the artist to Queen Alexandra. 

People who dislike caricature, who are squeamish in their 
acceptance of simple, unavoidable facts, find offence in an 
artist who draws attention to the signs and infirmities of a great 
old age, as A—o certainly has done here. This point of view is 
easy to understand only if the impartial observer to-day fully 
realizes the amazing hatred of truth, which happens to be in 
the least degree regrettable or sad, burning in the hearts of 
~ sentimentalists. And yet how otherwise could this and analogous 
caricature have been made, even by (though that is not to the 
point) a personal friend? The subject was a very old man: he 
looked just as he looks in this caricature, less the small margin of 
subtle over-statement which differentiates it from an “ aca- 
demic ” portrait. The sentimentalists, we suppose, would have 
his head erect, his arms akimbo, his blue eyes sparkling with 
youthful ardour. But that is the difficulty with people of this 
kind of artistic creed. 

The only quality to which they allow over-emphasis is 
sweetness. Its antithesis whether infirmity or deformity must 
be left out. The retreating forehead must be ennobled; eyes that 
Nature has set much too near together, must be widely separated 
to look out with wholesome and generous sincerity. And the 
“ point ” of a face, unless it be of a Greek God or an expensive 
doll, must be missed. The process of thought involved (if it can 
be called such) is precisely the same as that which urges a 
mother to arrange in love-locks the untidy hair, to set a clean, 
uncomfortable and unaccustomed collar about a rebellious neck, 
of the street urchin who is to have his picture took. 


75 


Chapter VIII 


CONTINENTAL CARICATURE 


1813, that no other country than England has encouraged the 

art of caricature because “no other portion of the globe 
enjoys equal freedom”, people enthusiastically interested in 
caricature invariably turn sooner or later to the Continental 
Press, old as well as modern; and to pamphlets and books, in 
which that art has been encouraged to satisfy the pleasure in 
satire which in England can only be obtained on rare occasions, 
and at some inconvenience by visiting an exhibition in London, 
or by buying expensive books. 

Since Malcolm’s day more colour has been lent to his asser- 
tion regarding the freedom of the Press: that we shall come to 
in its turn. But provided that the English observer can submit 
his insular prejudices to the discipline of humour and can enjoy 
a little satire, be it subtle or savage, directed against himself, as 
he may have to do from time to time, he will find an enormous 
mine for research where skill, elegance, wit, humour, deep 
feeling, and laughter pure and simple, have been diligently ex- 
ploited by a number of artists who, to the lover of caricature, 
have, especially during the nineteenth century, excelled our 
artists at every point. 

‘The way in which one nation is perceived by another through 
the medium of caricature tells more to the victim than it does, 
to the compatriots of the artist. English, Italians, Frenchmen, 
Spaniards, and Germans have their national conventions for 
foreigners. These have been built up out of an old and very 
slowly changing tradition. The Germans usually see us as tall, 
thin, with heavy moustaches, with somewhat protruding teeth. 
We see Italians only in terms of the Neapolitan organ-grinder 


76 


[: despite of James Peller Malcolm’s declaration, made in 


GONTINENTAL CARICATURE 


who is no more representative of Italy than a cretinous Welshman 
is of England, and so on. 

In the essay already quoted, Thackeray, in praise of George 
Cruikshank, expatiates on that artist’s attitude towards the French. 

“ , . . It must be confessed that for that great nation Mr. 
Cruikshank entertains a considerable contempt. Let the reader 
examine the ‘ Life in Paris’, or the five hundred designs in 
which Frenchmen are introduced, and he will find them almost 
invariably thin, with ludicrous spindle-shanks, pigtails, out- 
stretched hands, shrugging shoulders, and queer hair and 
moustachios. He has the British idea of a Frenchman: and if 
he does not believe that the inhabitants of France are for the 
most part dancing-masters and barbers, yet takes care to depict 
such in preference, and would not speak too well of them. It is 
curious how these traditions endure. In France, at the present 
moment (1840), the Englishman on the stage is the caricatured 


‘Englishman at the time of the war, with a shock red head, a long 


white coat, and invariable gaiters. Those who wish to study this 
subject, should peruse Monsieur Paul de Kock’s histories of 
‘Lord Boulingrog’ and ‘ Lady Crockmilove’ . . . We doubt 
if a good British gallery would believe that such and such a 
character was a Frenchman unless he appeared in the ancient 
traditional costume.” 


And, nearly a century later, we find that the “ stage-French- 
man”’, as often as not, and nearly always the Frenchman of the 
comic illustrated paper, is attired in a top-hat that in France 
would be regarded as an interesting antique; and the floppy bow 
chiefly worn nowadays by American art students who have 
heard of Murger at third hand. But how, if the reader of Punch 
were to see a drawing of an ordinary foreigner as he is, without 
a moustache like Napoleon III and all the rest of the stock 
properties, how would he know that a foreigner was intended? 

So both sides have to put up with all kinds of little injustices 
and misrepresentations which do no harm at all. 


fal 


A CHISTORY OF (GARIC ALG Re 


Continental caricature followed, with the necessary differ- 
ences of outlook, the same broad lines as the English during the 
eighteenth century. But whereas with the death of Dighton and 
the others and with the translation of Cruikshank from carica- 
ture to book illustration, the art in England passed for a time 
into complete abeyance, the same period in France became extra- 
ordinarily rich in brilliant satire. Before this, however, the end of 
the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth pro- 
duced little caricature of extreme distinction. Previous to 1830, 
the majority of satires were impersonal and with certain excep- 
tions to be mentioned were childish, vulgar, and incompetent. 
Unfortunately much of the best caricature of the end of the 
century not only in France, but in Germany, was anonymous. 
Some of it had need to be. 

The French Revolution produced caricatures both native and 
foreign of extreme bitterness on both sides. That was natural. 
But at the same time, or at all events, just before the Revolution 
and just after, all the usual crazes and follies of the moment 
were extensively dealt with. In 1785 we see the coiffure of ladies 
of fashion so enormously exaggerated that a carpenter must 
needs build a species of scaffolding within the wig, in order to 
hold it in position. In another a lady is found to be storing all 
her household goods, including a dog or two, in the colossal 
contraption which arises from her brow. 

In 1776 Hubert made a plate of thirteen heads of Voltaire, 
in various wigs, caps, and guises; but mostly with the same 
expression. This is strongly reminiscent of the plate of Characters 
and Caricatures made by Hogarth, somewhat earlier. ‘There are 
companion engravings of the Revolution showing L’ Aristocrate 
and La Democrate, two women suitably clothed to typify the 
opposing orders, though it is, oddly enough, extremely difficult 
to say on which side the artist had ranged himself: for the old 
aristocratic woman bitterly sneering and bedizened, looks to- 
wards the complementary engraving, in which a simply attired 
girl is given the face of a fiend incarnate. 

German caricaturists at this time, such as G6z, made delight- 


78 


ee ee ey ee ee 


eS iT a eee 


—s 


CONTINENTAL CARICATURE 


fully amusing satires upon the fashions—exquisite old gentle- 
men with beribboned walking-sticks, smiling girls in enormous 
hats. While, a little earlier, Pier Leone Ghezzi in Italy had made 
a maliciously clever caricature of the secretary of the Elector of 
Saxony. 

The best fashion caricatures were drawn by Frenchmen, such 
as Carle Vernet, Chataigner, and especially Isabey the elder, who 
made the companion pictures illustrating contrasts, which show 
a deformed but beautifully attired dwarf, taking the arm of a 
fine and buxom young woman. Au contraire, a big strapping man 
leads by the hand a gorgeously dressed female with the figure 
of a prize pig. 

The best of Isabey’s caricatures is a satire of fashion made 
in 1798 and called ‘ Petit-Coblentz”’. This is a most exquisitely 
coloured drawing and a supremely fine combined caricature of 
various notabilities. There is Napoleon, as we never see him 
drawn in England, with a prodigious jutting chin; 'Talleyrand in 
a stock which nearly hides his mouth, beautifully attired in a 
striped purple coat and yellow waistcoat ; Madame Reécamier, her 
face entirely hidden by her bonnet, is given a figure like a lamp- 
post, draped from the cross-bar downwards in a Directoire gown; 
she takes the arm of Garat, who dances a-tiptoe, his ugly super- 
cilious face looking, with the arrangement of his wig, precisely 
like a sheep, as does Bestris too, looking across at them through 
folding glasses; Murat lounges in the background; and the artist 
represents himself as a pale and miserable Hebrew on the ex- 
treme left of the picture. The colours of the various costumes 
are most delicately washed in, and in the background tall houses 
are deftly simplified. The caricature is meant to satirize the rise 
of the parvenu after the Revolution. It is not too much to say that 
its cruelty combined with elegance has never been excelled. It 
is a superb example of true personal caricature. 

The English in Paris in 1802 are caricatured by Carle Vernet, 
who contented himself with fashions and aspects of Society, and 
who was quite uninterested in politics. He gives the visitors in 
this caricature the most ungainly and untidy clothes: the men 


79 


A‘HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


have coats which do not fit, the women are either overdressed or 
mere bundles of wraps: their faces are hideous. It was not to be 
expected that tourists from this side of the Channel would, 
during that brief peace, be exactly welcome. 

At this period we have a number of French caricaturists 
illustrating Les Merveilleuses and Les Incroyables, corresponding 
to the Dandizettes and Dandies in England. Their fashions were 
delightfully preposterous, and are suitably dealt with. After the 
Restoration in Paris, satirists formed the habit of placing 
weathercocks after the names of various turn-coats. Talleyrand, 
the Yellow Dwarf, had six weathercocks. He was also, in 1817, 
caricatured as ‘The Man with Six Heads, depicted variously as 
Republican, Napoleonic Minister, a Bishop, and so forth. The 
head facing the observer shouts ‘“‘ Vive le Roi”, the Bishop calls 
out “ Vive les Notables’’, another ‘‘ Vive le 1 Consul”. 

Gaudissart made capital out of Cambacérés, and in several 
drawings he greatly exaggerates his shortness of stature and 
girth. In one drawing he is accompanied by the Marquis d’Aigre- 
feuille, and by de la Villevielle. d’Aigrefeuille also was fat, and 
he and Cambacerés are represented by complete circles: they 
entirely hide the thin form of Villevielle, whose mean, severe 
face just shows on the left of the composition. But with the 
exception of Isabey there was no great caricaturist until the 
thirties. 

In 1830 Charles Philipon, himself a young man, gathered 
around him an array of talent which, in that especial respect, 
was the greatest, although at the time fortuitous, journalistic 
triumph that has ever been known. His contributors numbered 
amongst them Decamps, Grandville (whose real name was 
Gérard), Monnier, Travies (Charles Joseph Traviés de Villers), 
Gavarni (Sulpice Paul Chevalier), and Honoré Daumier; the 
last of whom would have given imperishable fame to any editor 
who had the insight to employ him. 

On November 4th of that year Philipon brought out the first 
number of La Caricature, and Daumier used that paper in order 
to express opinions which were Republican without being 


80 


CONTINENTAL CARICATURE 


vulgar. He began work for that journal in 1832, a Provencal by 
birth, a lithographer by trade, and, but twenty-four years of age, 
he sprang into some sort of notoriety at once. It cannot be called 
fame, for his work was not immediately appreciated, and there 
was no very evident reason why it should be. He was not amaz- 
ingly precocious and he began with a modest effort, which did 
not seem to make any extravagant promises for his future. The 
caricature in question was called “ Gargantua ’’, and represented 
Louis Philippe seated on his throne and swallowing bags of 
money, extracted from the people by attendant ministers. These 
bags were carried from the ground up an inclined board to his 
open mouth. On the ground below a crowd of miserables are 
handing over their cash. For this satire Daumier was imprisoned 
from September of that year until the following February. A 
writer in La Caricature of August 30th, 1832, tearfully de- 
scribes him as having been arrested under the eyes of a father 
and mother whose only support he was. And M. Champfleury 
refers to his imprisonment for the love of art. This is, perhaps, a 
slightly picturesque rendering of the case. 

Casimir Perier, President of the Chamber of Deputies, had 
given orders to the law officers to keep up incessant prosecutions 
against the Republican journals. Philipon knew perfectly well 
what he was about. He was a man of great pluck and inex- 
haustible energy. A caricature of him by Benjamin gives no idea 
of the extremely good-looking man, whom, M. Champfleury 
tells us, people stopped to look at in the street. ‘The caricature 
emphasizes all the elements in a keen and humorous face which 
suggest intellect, mingled with a certain self-satisfied amusement. 
It is just the face you would, judging him from his record, 
expect that great editor to have. In one year only La Caricature 
was the object of fifty-four actions, so Perier’s instructions were 
evidently carried out. La Caricature died, and its place was taken 
by Le Charivari. Philipon, it was, who invented the famous 
pear which Louis Philippe’s head was supposed to resemble. 
Upon a page of La Caricature appears first a somewhat exag- 
gerated portrait of the bourgeois monarch. He had heavy cheeks 


81 G 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


and a multiplicity of chins: his head was somewhat narrowed to 
a point. A second head loses a little detail, and his hair is made 
to grow into a sharper apex above his forehead: in the third the 
hair is beginning to look like a leaf and still more detail disappears 
from the face. In the fourth hair and whiskers have become leaves 
and the pear is complete. 

Travies and Wattier had led off by drawing attention to this 
resemblance, and Daumier made a somewhat gross caricature 
of Lafayette asleep on a sofa with a colossal pear weighing on his 
chest. Prosecution followed automatically, whereupon Philipon 
in Le Charivari (February 27th, 1834) wrote an account on the 
title-page of that journal of the various judgments under which 
he had suffered; and he had the article set up by the printer in 
the shape of the now inevitable pear. Philipon was continually 
being put into gaol; issues of his paper constantly being seized; 
and a less obstinate man or a less courageous one would have 
long ago given in: but he never did. He fought for his principles 
throughout his life. 

In order to point their opinions, Philipon and his staff in- 
vented a number of characters which were to be the butts, the 
Aunt-Sallys to be set up for public ridicule. Thus Daumier made 
a puppet of Robert Macaire, who had been the chief character 
in a play of that name, which was suppressed as being political 
burlesque. Macaire has a foil in Bertrand who played a despic- 
able Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. There was the Foseph 
Prudhomme of Monnier; Mayeux, an evil dwarf of Traviés 
(though Daumier occasionally lent a hand with him); the Thomas 
Vireloque of Gavarni. This last was a kind of tramp-Diogenes: 
the dwarf Mayeux was symbolical of all the vices: Macaire was 
an impudent adventurer, the swindler of the stupid: Prudhomme 
the typical burgess. These last two have so passed into the 
French language that they are not infrequently referred to as 
actual, historical characters. | 

Honoré Daumier had that temper of mind, kindly but 
ferocious when needs be; he loved to lash social evils, he 
hated sham of all kinds, and he ruthlessly eliminated every 


82 


a ee ee a ee ee 


CONTINENTAL CARICATURE 


taint of the sentimental from his work. He stuck to the truth, 
as he saw it, even when he chose to depict a child dead by the 
roadside. There is a certain tincture of caricature in almost all 
that he did, though besides general social satires, he made from 
time to time definitely personal caricature-portraits of individual 
people. He was a beautiful draughtsman, with a style so original 
and distinct that his work may be said to shout his name down 
the length of any long gallery where it is hung. His high lights, 
his bony faces, his delicious sweeping curves, his treatment of 
hair, the joy he took in the folds of a stock, or the lines of a 
well-cut coat are entirely unmistakable. His early and unfortunate ~ 
experience of the courts of law helped him, no doubt, to specialize 
in the legal scenes for which he is probably most famous. 

In his history of Modern France, Monsieur Emile Bourgeois 
tells us that “in the comic papers, especially in the Charivari, 
Daumier, with fecundity and a vigour which spared no one, 
and a talent to which the greatest had to do homage, branded 
and exposed the middle-class, its types, its oddities, its preju- 
dices of all sorts. A Republican from the first, the advocate of 
every kind of liberty, in art as in politics, the foe of every re- 
striction behind which private interest and satisfied selfishness 
could shelter themselves. . . .”’ And, says M. Bourgeois, ‘‘ war 
was declared between the ‘ Joseph Prudhommes’ (of Monnier), 
worthies, whom nothing would have induced to give their 
daughters to “ scribblers ’, and the men of culture who were more 
interested in the common folk with all their roughness and 
ignorance.” 

In short, the point of view of Monnier and Daumier was, 
in despite of their republicanism, the aristocratic point of view. 

Louis Philippe was widely known as the Bourgeois King. His 
ideals were somewhat smug, he was eminently respectable. 
Looking back at that time both in France and in England it has 
long been customary to mock the renaissance of Puritanism 
which we call “ Victorian morality”, without honest inquiry as 
_ to what in it was of permanent value: and the mockers can no 
longer be dismissed by their elders on the score of youth. 


83 


AYHIS TORY OF CARIGADU Re 


The Sovereign and her court set the fashion in England for 
the majority of the people, or at all events the majority of 
moderately prosperous people, and the temper of the age was 
willing to accept the ideal set before them, without too close a 
scrutiny, as a convenient form of Christian life, perhaps rather 
prosaically adapted to our modern national disposition. But in 
France as well as England it was the age which saw also the 
authentication of the middle-class, who found in this fashion 
or example, whether exerted by the young Queen, or old Louis 
Philippe, a safeguard against relapse into the masses from which 
they had recently sprung, and which they now regarded with 
hatred and with fear: and who perceived in this example an 
antidote to the aristocratic cynicism which they mistrusted, and, 
at a distance, adored. To be sure that honesty was the best 
policy, to rank safety as a condition of virtue, to find something 
intrinsically admirable in the possession of wealth—these were 
among the cardinal persuasions of that great class, French and 
English, who looked to their respective monarchs so positively 
as of themselves. 

To be perfectly fair it should be added that the mockers 
usually make hypocrisy the chief count in their indictment of 
Victorian morality, just as though the cant of that and every 
other age were invariably deliberate, and as though it were not 
better, being human, to fall short of an ideal than to have no 
ideal at all. Of actually fraudulent piety that era was not greatly 
more prolific than the present or the remoter past. It was only 
a great deal more squeamish in the expression of its opinions; 
anyhow in England. 

On the other hand, people were too prone to believe that 
everything done within the law was right and they were able 
to take the fullest advantage of it. They were quite “‘ moral ”’, 
and perhaps herein lies the difference between morality and 
virtue, for the bare bones of the rule are insufficient to the 
virtuous. 

In France, then, Philipon and his lieutenants acted as a 
wholesome scourge to this self-complacency. They whipped the 


84 


GONTINENTAL CARICATURE 


burgess from the suburb to the office (in a manner of speaking 
and as it would be in England) and home again. They were 
genuinely humane. In England we were not so fortunate. 

Not that Daumier by any means confined himself to lashing 
the respectable citizen: humbug of every description was his 
prey. He was a genial, large-hearted artist, with a righteous 
but never self-righteous scorn. 

Occasionally he modelled figures which were cast in bronze, 
and his Ratapoil—a kind of raggamuffin Buonapartisan—is an 
extreme rarity, much longed for by eminent collectors. There 
were once, also, according to M. Geoffroy, who described them 
in L’Art et les Artistes in 1905, thirty-eight clay models in 
existence. 

The Robert Macaire series continued between 1835 and 1839; 
but Le Charivari printed most of Daumier’s lithographs for 
forty years. The point of most of the Macaire jests has now 
passed into oblivion. 

The Anglo-Saxon attitude towards the incomparable art of 
that period is typified by Mr. Thackeray, who, putting his hand, 
as it were, upon Daumier’s head, observed that if he would 
think more and exaggerate less he would add not a little to his 
reputation. 

From 1860 onwards to his death in 1879, Daumier gave a 
great deal of his time to painting. 

Traviés was a contemporary of the greater man, but died 
practically of starvation twenty years before him. His life was 
an unhappy one: he was tormented by physical infirmities, and 
his political caricatures reflected the temper of his mind, and 
there was generally a little poison at the end of his pen. Charles 
Baudelaire in his Curiosités d’Esthetiques gives an account of 
Mayeux, that evil dwarf, who struts and postures with savage 
grin, who puts on a cocked hat and staring at an effigy of Napo- 
leon, says to himself how like he is. Travies illustrated Balzac 
and in the Salon exhibited portraits of no great distinction. 

Another brilliant disciple of Philipon was Gavarni, who began 
life as a mechanic. Théophile Gauthier, who was his friend, 


85 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


describes him as good-looking and a dandy, a highly civilized 
person. As a young man he made a series of bitter caricatures of 
Charles X, but later realized with great regret that this was a 
somewhat spiteful proceeding against a helpless old gentleman 
in exile. A storm of abuse, especially on this side of the Channel, 
and the other side of the Atlantic, greeted Gavarni’s treatment 
of women. His jests about them, however, were not for the most 
part caricatures at all. 

“ It were as unjust,” says Mr. Parton, “ .. . to judge the 
frugal people of France by the comic annuals as the good- 
natured people of England by the Saturday Review.”* And in 
another place he says of Gavarni: 


“ Loose women, who are, as a class, very stupid, very 
vulgar, most greedy of gain and pleasure, and totally devoid of 
every kind of interesting quality, he endowed with a grace and 
wit, a fertility of resource, an airy elegance of demeanour, never 
found except in honourable women reared in honourable homes.” 


These are unexceptionable sentiments, but Mr. Parton had 
forgotten Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke, Madame de Pompadour, and 
Rahab. 

And Mr. Everitt, writing of Gustave Doré’s “ ghastly 
illustrations to the licentious Contes Drolatiques of Balzac” 
being “ cited in proof of his claims to be considered a carica- 
turist *, continues “I will not deny that Doré did try his hand 
once upon a time at caricature, and if we are to judge him by 
these attempts, we should pronounce him the worst French’ 
caricaturist the world ever saw, which would be saying a good » 
deal; for a worse school than that of the modern French carica- 
turists (and I do not except even Gavarni, Cham, or Daumier), 
does not anywhere exist.” 

Comment is paralysed. 

Referring to caricature of the unfortunate Charles X whilst 
in exile, one by Philipon himself is harmless enough—a mask 

* Without prejudice. B. L. 


86 


GONTINENTAL CARICATURE 


with the exaggerated show of teeth, and loose drooping underlip. 
But one by Alexandre Decamps, though extremely clever, is 
revoltingly cruel. The exiled King at Holyrood is seated in a 
cushioned armchair in dressing-gown and night-cap blazing 
away with a miniature gun at a toy rabbit which is being drawn 
across the floor on wheels by a lackey. The face, a good physical 
caricature, is yet made to suggest extreme imbecility. 

Fairer is an anonymous drawing of 1830 of Charles as a 
lobster in ermine, with the crown tumbled off his head and 
lying on the floor. And without offence too is one by Travies 
labelled ‘‘ Patisserie Royale”, in which the King, dressed as a 
baker, holds some minute loaves upon a board. 

Even Mr. Parton, after a long disquisition, part of which has 
already been quoted on the cynically improper predilections of 
Gavarni cannot resist quoting one of his jokes, published in the 
’seventies in a Parisian paper. 

A vivacious young woman, viciously smoking a cigarette, 
asks a page-boy who wishes to be engaged by her how old he 
is? “‘ Eleven, Madame.” ‘“‘ And your name?” “ Joseph.” “ So 
young, and already he calls himself Joseph! ” 

This dialogue was adapted twenty years later by the famous 
“ Pitcher ” of the Pink ’un. 

Gustave Doré, who was born in 1832, began life as a carica- 
turist in the ournal pour Rire. He satirized types rather than 
individuals, and his fame in this respect has been obscured by 
the deplorable paintings of his later life. When he was content to 
point the contrasts between the audience at a theatre full of 
excited enthusiasm and one that is asleep with boredom he 1s 
quite amusing. In 1868 he drew a series of Historical Cartoons, 
the descriptive text of which was supplied by ‘Thomas Wright. 
The sub-title is “‘ Rough pencillings of the World’s History from 
the First to the Nineteenth Century”. In this book he too dealt 
with ‘“‘ Les Incroyables” of 1798, giving the men a greatly 
exaggerated height, as he usually did, twisted sticks, and pre- 
posterously long crescent hats. He compared the fashions of 
1830 with those of 1840, describing exquisitely turned-out 


87 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


dandies with dainty women rowing about on a lake, serene and 
dignified, with a crowd of ragamuffins capering on the floor 
of a studio dressed as students with mushroom caps and enor- 
mous flopping bows. The essence of this sort of comparison has 
recurred at intervals since then and is a stock form of entertain- 
ment in the pages of modern Punch. 

Italy during the nineteenth century contributed extremely 
little to the history of caricature. In 1848 a weekly satirical paper 
Il Don Pirlone was soon suppressed. Pirlone was a familiar 
character in Italian farce, occupying an analogous position to 
Robert Macaire in France. The paper was directed against the 
Pope, who in one drawing is seen riding a monstrous bird, in 
the fork of whose dragon’s tail is held the papal crown. The bird 
has four heads intended to represent respectively France, Austria, 
Spain, and the infamous Bomba. In that year the French, under 
General Oudinot, occupied Rome and the paper ceased to exist. 

Another political caricaturist was Ratalanga who at the end 
of the century made personal caricatures, in black and white, of 
a number of statesmen such as Crispi and Giolitti. They are not 
without a suggestion of the contemporary work of Caran D’Ache. 

Returning to France, Cham (whose real name was Amédée 
de Noé, son of the Comte of that name, and hence the pseu- 
donym Cham, or Shem son of Noah), was another spasmodic 
caricaturist who devoted most of his energy, however, to general 
comic art. q 

Dantan made very clever caricatures of Paganini, Victor _ 
Hugo, Dumas the elder, and Liszt. The first and last of these _ 
being drawn in silhouette, with white lines giving the necessary _ 
detail, just as though they were rubbings from church brasses. 

Coming to times of recent memory one of the most brilliant 
of the crueller French caricaturists was Charles Léandre. His 
is the true art, searching the very soul by means of exaggera- 
tion, which varies in intensity according to the qualities that 
he wishes to exhibit. The humour and quiet content which — 
he managed to suggest in Monsieur Coquelin ainé is wholly © 
contained in the long upper lip. The raised eyebrows of Monsieur 


88 


CONTINENTAL CARICATURE 


Clemenceau as caricatured by him in 1898 hint at calm reflection, 
an outlook undimmed by any illusions, while the mouth demon- 
strates the Tiger. Zola, his bearded chin resting on a pile of 
books, his left eye greatly magnified by his pince-nez, gazing into 
the infinite, his moustache drawn up on one side to indicate 
a snarl, smashes down his quill pen with a vigorous right hand 
into a little pool of ink. The caricatures by which Léandre is best 
remembered, not with affection, in this country, were of Queen 
Victoria. Regarded as drawings, as suggested likenesses, they 
are incomparable. They appeared in Le Rire at the time of the 
South African War. 

André Gill (Gosset de Guine) who lived from 1840 to 1885 
made a number of interesting caricatures. There is Richard 
Wagner in 186g splitting a huge ear with a hammer and a chisel 
which is composed of a crotchet. Gambetta is spitefully and 
Thiers amusingly dealt with by him. In one drawing of the latter, 
a tiny, bespectacled, benevolent, elderly gentleman stands hand 
on hip right down in the corner of the page, casting behind him 
an enormous shadow in which his features are repeated in profile. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, the most brilliant 
French caricature of a political nature was made by Caran 
D’Ache (which is the Russian for pencil: his real name being 
Emmanuel Poirée), and Forain. Both of these artists dealt more 
in general satire than in personalities, but their work in both 
kinds was of great brilliance: and together they illustrated a 
short-lived periodical during 1898 and 1899, dealing mainly 
with the Dreyfus scandal, and known by the engaging name of 
Psst! The work of these two men was extraordinarily diverse. 
Forain had an untidy, scratchy technique, spontaneous, full of 
vitality. Caran D’Ache was finished, neat, precise. In his general 
satires he exaggerated wildly. When the lieutenant, showing his 
corporal how to utter the word of command, opens his mouth, the 
ranks fall prostrate back, the houses in the square are shattered. 

Of social caricature, the chief practitioner was and still is 
Monsieur Georges Goursat, who, under the name of 5em, has 
long achieved a wide fame. For the last few years he has made 


39 


AVHITS TORY VOR CART CAT) 


a speciality of the visitors to Deauville, and hanging in Ciro’s 
Club in London there is a very fine collection of his work. Sem 
can, when he chooses, be almost viciously cruel: and Argentine 
merchants and other people who display inordinate wealth in 
France are appropriately dealt with. In one caricature we have 
a visitor to the Ritz in Paris, exclaiming of another: “ It is the 
Comte de Chester!” “No,” says the waiter, ‘‘ That is the 
Prince de Galles! ”’ And the shade of Napoleon I toasts H.R.H. 
in Dry Monopole. 

We see the Agha Khan as himself, we see him as a stout 
fish; and here is the King of Spain, set in a favourable light ; 
there Ferdinand, late of Bulgaria, with the obvious emphasis 
laid upon his nose. 

On one occasion many years ago Sem paid a visit to New- 
market and made a series of caricatures of all sorts of people 
whom he saw beside the course, without any knowledge as to 
who or what they were. He cannot speak a word of English, and 
he merely made drawings of faces and figures that attracted him. 
It is interesting to know that at the end of the day, when he 
showed the drawings to an English friend, there was not one 
to which the latter could not put a name. His gift for reading 
and recording character is so acute as to be positively dangerous. 

Monsieur André Rouveyre made a series of caricatures, 
originally published in the Mercure de France between 1908 and 
1913, which were called Visages des Contemporains.* "These 
drawings, says M. de Gourmont, vary from photography to 
caricature. But it is evident that most of them belong to the 
latter category. M. Rouveyre is one of the most intellectual 
French caricaturists, his manner consisting in what appears at 
the first glance to be a roughly scribbled impression. He is 
“ modern ” in his contempt for natural form, where facts have — 
no special message to give. But a second and a third glance—and 
these are compelled—at these extraordinarily brilliant drawings 
(some of which he has been so kind as to allow me to reproduce 


* Visages des Contemporains: Portraits dessinés d’aprés le vif: Par André 
Rouveyre. Préface de Remy de Gourmont. Paris, Mercure de France. 1913. 


go 


PONT INEN TAL CARICATURE 


here) convinces us that nothing of importance to the caricature, 
as such, has been left out or slurred over. ‘Though his physical 
likenesses are never to be despised, it is the character of the 
individual all the time that he is hunting down into the last 
hiding place of its ultimate essence. 

M. de Gourmont admits that Rouveyre is cruel and of his 
caricatures of women, which, to our way of thinking, are positively 
diabolical, he adds: “ They ought not to make us laugh, but 
only to think.” That is true. Once again we have, in regarding 
this artist’s work, as we must always, when we encounter a 
vital and original mind,—we have to lay aside or try to lay aside 
preconceived ideas, and accepting for the moment the result of 
his vision as a workable hypothesis, to inquire whether it is to 
be relied upon: and having made that inquiry honestly and 
without prejudice (if that is possible: it is not easy) we shall be 
forced to the conclusion—which on one or two occasions we 
have reached before—that the truth, seen to the best of an alert 
human capability, is not very cheering. 

Some of the best caricatures, so far, at least, as physical 
resemblance is concerned, have been made during the last thirty 
years or so in German papers, such as Simplicissimus,* fugend 
(before the war), and Kladderadatsch. fugend has now given up 
caricature, but Simplicissimus still continues with the aid of old 
contributors to chastise what seems to the conductors the follies 
and injustices of the moment. We were fond, during the war, of 
assuming that no word in Germany was permitted to be uttered 
against the family of Hohenzollern: but a glance at this paper 
once a month or so, before the war, would have dispelled this 
illusion. Neither the then All-Highest nor any of his family 
escaped. And during the war, though Szmplicissimus excelled 
its customary violence and humourless brutality, its satire was 
occasionally tempered by a sort of grim respect for us. 


* Sir Edmund Gosse, writing in The Gypsy (May 1915), traces the origin of 
the name from Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, an autobiographical 
novel by Hans Jacob Christoph von Grimmelshausen, published in 1669, which 
describes certain phases of the Thirty Years’ War. 


gi 


A-HISTORY\OF GARICATUOURS 


The principal artist on the staff of this paper is, and has been 
for many years, a man of Danish birth, Olaf Gulbransson. His 
usual method is to make caricatures, personal or general, with 
a very fine pen line. His work is brimming with invention, in 
which he is constantly surprising and charming the observer 
with all manner of technical conceits. His perceptions, at all 
events of foreigners, seldom go very far beneath the surface. 
The merit of his caricatures are usually to be found in the situa- 
tion together with his ingenious tricks for producing likenesses. 

His coadjutors, Heine, Thény, and Blix, are not so fond of 
personal caricature; but all three of them have made skilful 
contributions to that art at one time or another. 

In Spain excellent caricatures are made in El Sol, and other 
papers, by Sancha and Bagarya. 

The most distinguished Italian caricaturist during the last 
half-century has been Enrico Sachetti, who once made a superb 
drawing of Tomaso Salvini. His perception of Novelli and 
Ruggeri are full of vital criticism. Filiberto Scarpelli made a 
series of caricatures early in the twentieth century of which that 
of the late Madame Duse and Gabriele D’Annunzio were 
absurd without being ridiculous. 


Mr. W. Somerset Maugham 
By Miguel Covarrubias 


— 


Ee ee ee a ee a er 


eee ie 


Chapter IX 


THE RECENT PAST 


\ S we have already seen caricature has very often been 


the recreation of serious artists, several of whom, 

however, would have bettered themselves and _ their 
reputations by reversing the procedure. It is a pathetic fact that 
Nature, who knows what is best for us, often tricks us into 
believing that what we do badly is our appointed task, that what 
Wwe most enjoy is but a game. And it is, perhaps, not Nature who 
tricks us after all: perhaps it is that damnable tradition which 
lingers yet, flogging our minds to accept all that is unpleasant as 
dutiful, all that is joyous as of dubious moral worth. 

A few years ago, before the war, there died at the age of 
thirty-one, at the outset of his career, an artist of great promise, 
a caricaturist of small but brilliant achievement. Henry Ospovat 
was like other caricaturists before him, a lithographer by trade, 
who designed book-plates in his youth, of little interest, in what 
Mr. Oliver Onions* calls the “ Birmingham tradition ”’. 

He had, at the age of twenty, a scholarship at South Kensing- 
ton; and his work, especially as a black and white artist developed 
rapidly. Two years later, in 1899, he was illustrating the poems 
of Matthew Arnold for an edition to be published by Mr. John 
Lane. Some of his book illustrations are very fine indeed. The 
age-old sorrows of Israel (at all events of Israel in Russia) were 
in his blood, and are evident in the more original of his works. 
In pen and ink drawing, Mr. Onions says that he “ over-fulfilled 
the requirements’”’, and “ to other men, their work was something 
that they did; Henry Ospovat’s work was something that he was”’. 


* The Work of Henry Ospovat. With an appreciation by Oliver Onions. (The 
St. Catherine Press.) 1911. 


93 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


Not very long before his premature death he began painting, 
his first picture being “ The Portrait of a Musician ’’. This be- 
ginning was quite sudden and without practice: he felt, it seems, 
abruptly inspired to express himself in paint; and the technical 
difficulties which most painters learn only to overcome during a 
long drudgery of apprenticeship, for him resolved themselves 
by instinct. Whether he would have ever become a very great 
portrait painter, as his friends believed, there is insufficient 
evidence to tell us. But, with an equal suddenness, he began to 
make caricatures, and these are unquestionably of extreme 
brilliance. Judging by the little that he left behind him, he was 
a far better caricaturist than he was painter. We are to conclude 
from Mr. Onion’s essay that for Ospovat caricature was just 
eye-practice in essentials, with the end of portrait-painting in 
view: and he had projected a book—Stars of the Music-Hall Stage 
—which, however, was never published. 

The considerable time at the end of his life given by this 
artist to caricature was regretted by many of his friends, who 
believed, with the unmitigated seriousness of young artists, that 
he was wasting that time: and, possibly, if caricature is to be 
regarded as a wholly frivolous occupation, they were right. If 
we are, however, to judge by what he accomplished and if, 
looking fore and aft of us, we find that we can allow the inclusion 
of this art in a serious category (and many of us do so) we shall 
find that our regrets cling to the unmade caricatures of Ospovat 
and not to his unmade paintings. 

His best caricatures were, then, of people who are widely 
known to the public; and they can therefore be submitted to no 
mere narrow tribunal. Arthur Roberts, Marie Lloyd—here they 
were in life upon the stage, over-stating themselves, as it were, 
in expressing that incomparable way-with-them to a delighted 
audience: and here they are in the caricatures, doubly over- 
stated, since the pictorial artist must in this sort of case go one 
better than the actor. Mr. George Grossmith, the caricature of 
whom is amongst the illustrations of this book, is the victim here 
of extraordinarily discerning comment. His laughter is not only 


94 


Te a I i oe ee Por’, Br 


So LL eT ee 


: 
| 


THE RECENT PAST 


his own, it is the insensate laughter of the crowd who shout with 
merriment immediately a comedian, in whatever innocence, 
comes upon the stage. Signor Caruso (himself a crafty carica- 
turist of few lines and entertaining invention) stands forth in 
Ospovat’s interpretation with a naked soul. We see, as it were, 
the personification of that exquisite voice and beyond that 
almost nullity. The fat, contented personality, excessively 
pleased with himself, prosperous and pampered is there: but 
he is only a voice. 

Claude Lovat Fraser, on the other hand, who no doubt found 
a recreation in caricature, was not nearly so successful in the art 
as in the main body of his work. He displayed considerable 
ingenuity in “ catching ”’ a likeness in a few lines, but it was 
scarcely more than a clever trick. There was no penetration be- 
neath surface appearances, no comment to speak of, and no 
attempt, probably, at any such thing. For him caricature was a 
game: that was all. 

It must have come with a great surprise to admirers of the 
late Derwent Wood, R.A., for all his versatility, to find in the 
memorial exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, held in the 
Spring of 1926, that in odd moments he had made a large 
number of shrewd caricatures. There, amongst signs of mani- 
fold activities, sculptures, landscapes, studies from the nude, 
architectural designs, are a few framed and a large number of 
merely mounted drawings of various friends and notabilities. 
They are made upon odd scraps of paper, upon envelopes and 
so forth. Most of them were drawn at dinner-parties and consist 
of pencil sketches, tinted here and there, with a drop of port 
wine smudged on with a finger. In one case, a victim is given 
an actual buttonhole of a leaf of smilax from the table decora- 
tions, and thrust through a little slit in the paper. They are 
eminently the caricatures of an accomplished and academic 
artist. "hat is to say, that while the likeness to the individual is 
sometimes grievously at fault the actual line, hastily scribbled, 
has that deft assurance, that spontaneity, that meaning, which 
can only come of long practice and great accomplishment in a 


95 


A HISTORY OF CARICA Vk 


more deliberate manner. There is Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, and 
Mr. Edmund J. Sullivan, that genius of black and white drawing, 
looking dour and discontented; Mr. Charles Ricketts, seriously 


4 


serene; Sir Frederick Ponsonby and Mr. Fiddes Watt. They are ° 


only jokes, eked out with a felicitous dexterity by such pigments 
and accessories as the dinner table afforded. But they must have 
been great fun to do, just as they provide great fun to look at. 

Phil May and Harry Furniss were neither of them true 
caricaturists, as it were, by profession, though both of them made 
caricatures from time to time. But the use that Furniss made of 
Mr. Gladstone’s famous collars will be remembered long after 
the work of some more accomplished caricaturists has passed 
into oblivion. In his drawings of that same subject he also gave 
very skilled emphasis to the expression of fiery anger on the face 
of the G.O.M. Phil May often introduced caricatures of himself 
into groups of individuals who are scarcely exaggerated at all. 
Probably his most successful caricature is a swift and masterly 
impression in red and black chalk of Sir Henry Irving as Mephis- 
topheles, which hangs in the Savage Club. 


(Fry 
| =~ 
SR a & 
/ Ss 
SS 


& ° 4 


Mr. H. L. Mencken 
By Miguel Covarrubias 


Z 
zi 
; 
j 
; 


 —- | Seae  2.. 


eee ee SS es 


Chapter X 


MAX BEERBOHM 


of one of Mr. Beerbohm’s exhibitions, or on a visit to 

any considerable collection of his work is the inherent 
gaiety and the pleasure which he has taken in executing it, a 
pleasure which communicates itself to the spectator long before 
he has time to admire the individual drawings for their peculiar 
merits. 

At the time of writing Mr. Beerbohm has given about eight 
exhibitions, between 1901 and 1925, at the Carfax and the 
Leicester Galleries, and these have been followed by the pub- 
lication in book form of some, but not of all, the caricatures 
hung there. A great deal of his work, moreover, has never been 
exhibited or reproduced at all: for he has that rare fastidious 
temper of mind which finds satisfaction in giving pleasure to 
private individuals, a greater satisfaction, maybe, and for that 
sort of mind than is derived from an exhibition or a book in 
which mercantile interests are involved. 

Max Beerbohm’s ironic tastes are manifested in two ways, by 
writing and by drawing: each complement the other. But while 
the writing explains itself and stands alone, much of his work 
as a caricaturist is eked out by legends. Critics have complained 
about this: they have pointed out that a drawing should explain 
itself; although why it should do so, and why the two branches 
of a similar art should not be compounded, it is difficult to say. 
Writing, though it comes from interior necessity, has ever been 
an irksome task to Mr. Beerbohm: he finds it extraordinarily 
difficult to conciliate his own conscience in the laying out and 
setting down of any story or essay, however hot within him may 
have been the original impulse to begin it. 


2M ia 


6 ix fact which strikes the beholder at the first glance 


ASHISTORY OP CARI C AT Cie 


Drawing, on the other hand, is a recreation, a delight, a joke, 
an absorbing occupation. What is writing? Hours of that exercise 
may produce an inch or so of laboured scrawl. Literally and in 
dismal fact you sit at a table; you have pen, ink, blotter, and 
paper. With those dull tools alone to beguile the tedium of your 
work, you must cudgel your brains and put down what they all 
too slowly and reluctantly vouchsafe. From time to time the job 
is lightened by the need to refer to a dictionary or an encyclo- 
pedia. But neither dictionaries nor encyclopedias are really 
things to play with: they are heavy and difficult to put back into 
their shelves, their backs are liable to break. The irrelevant 
information scattered on their thousand pages is not unlikely to 
distract the writer from the matter in hand. In the course of 
discovering how many l’s there are in callipers, my eye is struck 
by calorimeter and calumet, which must forthwith be explored; 
and one thing leads to another. Writing is not a game. 

But drawing, now: and especially the drawing of caricatures. 
Let the artist count his blessings, one by one. On the sheet, 
neatly pinned upon the board, so soon to the practised on by the 
lucky hand, comes out some result, something satisfying, some- 
thing done. The caricaturist sits or stands in a good light—he 
must. He has (as least this caricaturist of whom we are talking 
has) all manner of delightful playthings—pencils, indiarubber, 
saucers into which bright tubes of tinfoil have disgorged en- 
chanting pigments. There is hard labour in the job, but it does 
not need a moralist to tell you that jobs performed without 
effort are seldom very flattering to self-complacency. There 
may be good days and bad. The caricaturist may “ get ” his 
victim at the first shot, or he may be, as Mr. Ralph Barton, the 
American caricaturist, has informed me, permitted by God only 
to draw a really good caricature after the first hundred attempts. 
But the tools of his trade are objects of affection and interest in 
themselves. Without any substantial result in view there is the 
most delicate pleasure to be got by messing about with a paint- 
box and a pot of water and brushes of various sizes, in sharpen- 
ing a good pencil with a well-tempered knife. There is indeed a 


98 


MAX BEERBOHM 


very primitive joy in all these performances, as we know from 
the extreme and proved antiquity of the pastime. And ancient 
pastimes are, we are sure, the best: “‘ things”, as Mr. Beerbohm 
once said, “‘ that always have been and never will not be ”’. 

And then, what a mixture of delights, what an answering 
chord to every human mood, caricature provides. The artist 
seldom, I hope, feels responsible and heavy. Full of public 
spirit, he champions an obvious cause with impressiveness, but 
never, if he happens to be Max Beerbohm, with pomposity. He 
feels merry; the light airs of spring fan him through the open 
window, the sea and the sky are one incredible blue, the red 
sealing-wax is reflected in the dark tones of the glass ink-pot, 
everything is very well. Some happy fancy arises, some new 
invention, some odd revealing flash comes to the joyous mind, 
which shall expose some facet of a great man’s character. Not 
less joyous the morning, not less serene the equanimity of the 
caricaturist, when there suddenly crosses his mind, and is 
remembered in crossing, some little fault, some damned in- 
elegance which will repay pictorial attention. The work is full 
of variety, it is variety in essence. No wonder that the craftsman 
finds pleasure in it; and that it is not spoiled for him by necessary 
commercial implications is a fortunate accident. 

And perhaps more fortunate than most, Mr. Beerbohm 
requires no collaborator. During the period of his task he seldom 
draws from life: seldom are the results satisfactory when he does. 
His caricatures, like Pellegrini’s were, are made from memory. 
His best drawings are, though not without exception, of people 
with whose faces he is not intimately familiar. The reason for 
this is simple. What remains in his memory, which is a good one, 
is the salient residuum of a face and figure: salient for him, that 
is. A big nose, instantly to be seized on and grossly to be exag- 
gerated by the commonplace artist, may leave Max Beerbohm 
quite uninterested and forgetful. He may perceive that the nose, 
though big, has no significance in regard to the individual’s 
character. Some other feature, not immediately remarkable, 
may have it. He remembers, then, that feature which does seem 


99 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


to him important and draws attention to it, and leaves the nose 
severely alone. That is, he treats it with the contempt of plain 
reality or understatement. Clothes, likewise, not necessarily the 
exact clothes that the subject habitually wears, but clothes in 
keeping with his character are what he chooses to delineate. He 
delights in drawing pictures of dandies and this delight of his 
has, in these days, but little opportunity. He finds, however, 
dandiacal tendencies in one man who in life is ordinarily clothed: 
he emphatically finds slovenly tendencies in persons who are 
neat and tidy. His treatment of feet especially demonstrate this 
trick. With few exceptions he has two formulz or conventions 
for feet: an enormous, round-toed shapeless monstrosity and a 
mere tapering off of the legs into nothing at all. It may be dodging 
a limitation, but it serves a positive purpose as well. 

Another convention, this time for dandies, is the beautifully 
curved arm, which has no elbow: a third, and this a personal 
one, is the enormous hand which he invariably gives to Professor 
Rothenstein to indicate that artist’s abounding energy. Other 
instances occur to the close observer. In another book,* now out 
of print, an attempt was made to observe Max Beerbohm’s work 
in perspective. The instrument used for this purpose was 
intended to be a magnifying glass, but was in fact a curry-comb. 
In it the curious might have found an extremely detailed and 
even laborious account of all the various stages of Mr. Beer- 
bohm’s career, together with an explanation of the many types 
of his caricatures. No such detail shall be repeated here: but it 
is interesting to remind oneself of a few facts. 

Caricaturing was Max Beerbohm’s first love, and preceded, 
though not by long, any attempts by him at writing. His juventla 
though promising were not precocious. He was twenty when, in 
1892, he contributed some caricatures of Club Types to the 
Strand Magazine. 'There were thirty-six of these types: they 
admirably exemplified the clubs named. Here and there in them 
is to be observed a hint, no more, of influence by Ape and Spy. 
But looked at without such impertinent curiosity as that implies, 

* Max Beerbohm in Perspective. (Heinemann.) 1921. 


100 


MAX BEERBOHM 


they interpret principally the influence and inspiration of an 
original mind. They were not like other people’s drawings. They 
are dimly, persistingly and as though seen from a great distance 
like the Max caricatures that we know to-day. 

In 1894 and 1895 Max became a regular contributor to the 
long defunct Pick-me-up. His drawings in that periodical were 
done with a fine pen which is not the medium which suits his 
talent best. A pencil drawing of King George IV in the third 
number of the Yellow Book demonstrated his interest in clothes 
and the exquisite curves for which they give opportunities. The 
Savoy, edited by Mr. Arthur Symons, with Aubrey Beardsley 
as art editor, provided the next opening, in which Max's drawings 
were for the most part of a similar kind to those in Pick-me-up. 
There was, for instance, a diagram of Beardsley himself. This is 
a good physical likeness and a good caricature, full of comment: 
in it actual peculiarities are not merely exaggerated, they be- 
come anatomical absurdities. If one must look about for a 
comparison, the cunning of Gulbransson of Simplicissimus 
suggests itself. 

But these drawings belonged only to a probationary period, 
as did also the drawings collected in The Poets’ Corner, and in 
Cartoons : the Second Childhood of fohn Bull. These were pub- 
lished in 1904 and 1911 respectively, but the John Bull series 1s 
apt to give a misleading idea of the artist's progress, because the 
drawings for it had been made ten years before. Between the 
two, and published in 1907, came A Book of Caricatures. These 
mark a very substantial advance upon any work previously ex- 
hibited. The original drawings are widely scattered now; but, 
the plates being collotypes are the best reproductions that have 
ever been made of Max’s work. Here for the first time we find 
him using, seldom but happily, a quill pen. Sem, the French 
caricaturist, Lord Tweedmouth, and Mr. Reginald ‘Turner are 
done in this way: and in private collections there are Sir Squire 
Bancroft and James Welch, besides the Swinburne reproduced 
in this book, which speaks very eloquently for itself. 

It may have been an arduous task, the making of that carica- 


IOI 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


ture; it may have been the hundredth shot, but it does not look 
like that. It looks like the work of a very happy moment. 

This caricature of Swinburne was made in 1899, probably 
just after that visit paid by Max Beerbohm to No. 2, the Pines, 
so felicitously described by him in the essay under that title. 
It is interesting to compare it with Pellegrini’s study of the poet 
reproduced here, though a good many years separated the two 
caricaturists’ respective observation of the subject. 

Max Beerbohm does not “ draw well for reproduction”’, 
though his cleaner line and craftier use of water colour are better 
in this connexion now than they used to be. But he needs for 
reproduction and deserves the best mechanical processes in use 
to-day. 

His personal and individual caricatures have generally been 
better than his groups, at all events groups of more than two 
people. But here again his proficiency has so far advanced that the 
technical pitfalls inherent in a subject containing a number of 
people have been safely filled in. The individual caricatures re- 
main the more interesting because the artist’s interest in an 
individual is informed with a personal feeling, which the true 
caricaturist can seldom summon up for a crowd. 

T'wo points of importance are to be observed in Max Beer- 
bohm’s succeeding exhibitions. First, the permanence of his 
inspiration: that is, what pleased him as a young man pleases 
him still: what amused him in 1913 tickles some complementary 
corner of his mind to-day. In the poet’s corner there is a carica- 
ture of Matthew Arnold leaning, grinning, against a mantel- 
piece. Looking up at him, darkly dressed in red, her hands 
demurely clasped behind her, is a little girl, his niece, subse- 
quently Mrs. Humphrey Ward. 

“Why, Uncle Matthew,” she says, ‘‘ Oh, why, will not you 
be always wholly serious? ” 

In the exhibition of 1923 there was a caricature of Mr. 
Lytton Strachey, leaning also on the mantelpiece, not smiling, 
however, but seriously regarding a little girl. ‘This is called “‘ An 
Echo”’—merely. You are expected to remember: if you have once 


102 


Al A i 
aS 


a | wo 2) oe Sea ae > «a — 7 
Ee en | 4. A are ee Ol ose a 


I SN a OR ec 


MAX BEERBOHM 


seen the Matthew Arnold you will. And you will appreciate the 
extremely subtle and very splendid compliment to Mr. Strachey. 

In 1913 also we saw The Grave Misgivings of the Nine- 
teenth Century and the Wicked Amusement of the Eighteenth 
in Watching the Progress (or whatever it is) of the Twentieth. 
The Nineteenth Century is exemplified by a comfortable, mild, 
stout, elderly gentleman with whiskers: the Eighteenth by a 
sardonically smiling, elegant, and thin dandy. ‘The Twentieth 
wears the dress of an airman, and rushes sweating and desperate 
across the picture. 

In 1921 a similar idea is illustrated by three drawings: 'he 
Future, as beheld respectively by the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, 
and Twentieth Centuries. The Eighteenth Century sees but a 
copy of his contented and exquisite self: the Nineteenth, a 
stouter, richer, more important self. But the Twentieth is a 
young man who has lost an arm in the war, who is pale and 
careworn; and he looks into the Future and sees only a vague 
mark of interrogation. 

The second point especially to be observed about Max’s 
succeeding exhibitions is that, apart from the necessary stock- 
in-trade of even the exceptional caricaturists, he has some 
surprise for the spectator on each occasion, some trick or whim, 
some new excuse as it were, for fresh invention. In 1921, he 
exhibited a series of “ doubles ” or smudges, made by folding 
a sheet of paper in half, making as he himself put it, “ some 
random blotch on it”, folding again, unfolding, and seeing what 
possibility was suggested and proceeding “ to make blotches of 
4 more calculated kind. A little cheating—a very little of it—is 
within the rules of the game.” 

The results of some of these ‘‘ doubles” were very happy, 
but the drawing which Max Beerbohm has ‘ calculated ”’ from 
outset to fulfilment is far better. 

The new accomplishment of the following exhibition, that 
of 1923, was a series of portraits of the ’seventies, drawn in the 
attist’s most mature manner and signed and dated as though 
made in those ’seventies. They were in fact caricatures of indi- 


103 


A HISTORY OF CARIGATURE 


viduals typical of their time who never existed, but they were 
made just exactly as Max makes his caricatures of individuals 
to-day. (It need hardly be said that numbers of spectators 
believed in their identities, and some even claimed to have 
known them, and wondered indeed at the dates written on the 
drawings, supposing Mr. Beerbohm to be a much younger 
man. And, to be sure, looking at General Sir George Rawlinson, 
at Admiral Sir Japhet Kenway, and at Mr. Vansittart, it is hard 
to believe that these and the rest were not personally known to 
one’s parents, for their names, their attitudes, their clothes, their 
faces, are entirely authentic—so authentic, so natural that 
another section of spectators were quite unable to see the point 
of their inclusion in the exhibition.) 

The analogous contribution to the show in 1925 was a series 
entitled The Old and the Young Self, where twenty persons, now 
of mature years, converse with themselves when young. The 
only demerit of this series as compared with the others men- 
tioned, is that, while the former deal with matters or persons of 
a more or less permanent interest, the Old and Young Selves 
have reputations not all of which will assuredly survive living 
memory. These conversations and situations (in two instances 
the drawings are not accompanied by any text, and explain 
themselves), are variously successful: one of them will call for 
mention a little later. 

The most important work that Mr. Beerbohm has given us 
is the series of nine drawings entitled “ Tales of Three Nations ¥; 
symbolising the relative positions of England, France, and 
Germany from the time of the N apoleonic wars to the present 
day. John Bull, in turn, is apprehensive, prosperous, more 
prosperous, youthfully courageous in 1914, and haggard under a 
load of debt in the period after the war. Germany grows and 
grows in truculence and robustness, only to end as a suppliant 
beggar, out at knees and elbows; and France who began with 
eagle nose and the huge sabre of the first Napoleon, passes 
through varying stages of fortune and misfortune until she is seen 
thin, rapacious but very dominant, with the false beak imitating 


104 


MAX -BEERBOHM 


the real one of the first Napoleon, emaciated, huge. That is a 
solid contribution to history. 

The tendencies of his day no less than individuals earn Max 
Beerbohm’s close attention. The worst of the caricaturist’s art 
is that, apart from its qualities of colour and design, it so seldom 
has a high permanent value. (A high price, on the other hand, 
it may easily demand: for price is dependent upon other con- 
siderations, such, for example, as fashion. The collector of 
prints no longer buys plates etched by Gillray or by Rowlandson 
for mere pence: though he may be, now and again, more fortu- 
nate in the matter of other men such as Dighton. Original draw- 
ings, on the other hand [and no good etchings or engravings 
have been made of Max Beerbohm’s work], naturally demand 
a greater price.) But where the caricaturist has sufficient 
skill and taste to give his work intrinsic interest we need not 
complain. 

The drawing of Mr. Frank Brangwyn “ taking a five minutes’ 
well-earned rest ”’ will not be “ topical ” for much longer than 
Mr. Brangwyn’s lifetime. This was exhibited in 1925. Sorry the 
succeeding generation for which this caricature, having no point, 
fails to earn appreciation for its design and colour. The wretch 
who is being beaten by devils carved in stone at the head of 
some cathedral column would certainly give us keener delight 
if we knew him to be a priest whom we disliked and whom we 
could recognize; but neither he nor Isaac of Norwich, nor 
Luther Seven-Heads, completely elude our curiosity and 
interest. he minor troubles of administration at the end of the 
eighteenth century cannot really be said to make our hearts beat 
faster, but Newton’s caricature of Pitt and Fox need not depend 
for its appeal to us upon anything but the way in which it is drawn. 

Mr. Beerbohm’s approach to caricature may be described 
(like Luther) under seven heads. 

1. Gross exaggeration he has now almost abandoned for 
many years. One of the best examples in this kind was a “ King 
of Spain”’ made in 1914, in which that agile monarch is dressed in 
assertively English country clothes, while the Hapsburg lip and 


105 


A HISTORY: OF CARICATURE 


the position of the eyes is developed to the furthest legitimate 
limit. 

2. Elegance has ever been a magnet to him. Lord Chester- 
field of long ago cuts dead the elder Earl of later days because he 
is wearing a billycock hat: but each self, young and old, suggests 
a dandy as seen by another. The same may be said of a caricature 
of “‘ Sir Philip Sassoon”, drawn in 1913, or a “ Sir Claude 
Phillips ‘ going on’ ”’ (1914). 

3. Serious satire, not always quite seriously expressed has 
already been touched upon. 

4. General satire, combined with and much strengthened by 
honest hate, is admirably shown by that Captain of Industry 
(1921) who declares to a pallid curate that “ the desire of the 
manual workers to be paid exorbitant wages for doing the least 
possible amount of work is a sure sign that they have lost their 
faith in a future life’. Whatever our political sympathies (if 
any) nothing could be more repulsive than this captain of in- 
dustry, and he is the more repulsive for his evident prosperity. 
But in “ Civilization and the Industrial System ” (1925) the 
figure which typifies that system is more than merely repulsive: 
it is disgusting, and rightly so. Half-naked, hairy, wearing 
diamonds in his belt and spats, an enormity of coarse breeding, 
square-fingered and long-lipped, he blows the smoke of his 
cigar into the face of the lady, as he says: “ No, my dear, you 
may ’ve ceased to love me; but you took me for better or wuss 
in younger and ’appier days and there’ll be no getting away for 
you from me, ever.” Let us pray that Mr. Beerbohm’s per- 
spicacity has here, for once, failed him. 

5. Malice, of a personal kind, so opposed to the almost- 
brutality of the subject of the last paragraph, is a quality common 
to almost all men: though many critics almost passionately (but 
somewhat mysteriously) deny that our most distinguished cari- 
caturist is ever malicious. Max Beerbohm never takes a mean 
advantage, but he certainly lunges with his rapier under his man’s 
guard. Why not? Was it admiration for the qualities implied which 
made him put into the mouth of Mr. Lloyd George as he nudges M. 


106 


a 
*] 
ote) 
. 
ss 
" 


4 


ne en a gy 


MAX BEERBOHM 


Clemenceau and regards that weary invalid, President Wilson,the 
words “ Thought he was going to get the better of you and I”. 

6. Laughter, not loud, but happy and chuckling is scarcely 
ever absent when contemplating his work. Typical of his wit is 
that drawing of Mr. H. G. Wells urging Mr. Arnold Bennett to 
stand for Parliament. “ Parliament, eh? ” he replies, ‘“ well, get 
‘em to raise the screw to forty thou’, and perhaps I’ll think of 
it.” But these words enclosed in the usual label proceeding from 
the victim’s mouth are not written in Max’s handwriting, but 
typed. This is the keenest and subtlest comment that Max has 
ever made. It is of the purest spirit of caricature. Laughter which 
is, perhaps, a little savage arises from the contemplation of that 
~ Miniature design for colossal fresco commemorating the 
International Advertising Convention (Wembley, July 1924) and 
the truly wondrous torrents of cant and bunkum that were out- 
poured from it”’. Each magnate of commerce wears his halo and 
turns up his eyes and folds his hands. We remember as we look 
upon this drawing that men have talked of the poetry of Business. 

7. Beauty is the last quality that you expect from a carica- 
turist, though many instances in the past have outrun expecta- 
tion. So much depends upon what you call beauty. That gaiety, 
already referred to, grows at the second glance, which takes a 
whole wall of framed drawings in one sweep, into a delightful 
appreciation of delicate tints and patterns, arranged with taste 
and knowledge and a very virtuous gift for design. Max’s use of 
water-colour upon paper which is not quite white, paper to 
which he has been faithful for many years, is deft and individual: 
and in his choice of tints and shades his fastidiousness, his enjoy- 
ment of the work, and his understanding of each individual 
_ subject is explicit. And the basic likeness of one drawing to 
another gives a harmony to a whole room filled with them, which 
is seldom to be perceived in other men’s collected work. 

There is also that beauty of line, true, clean, and unfaltering, 
which is to be seen in nearly all his work; but which is seen 
perhaps at its cleanest and truest in the caricature of Swinburne 
amongst the illustrations here. The sweeping curves each have 


107 


A HISTORY‘ OF CARICATURE 


their meaning, either in relation to the subject, or more generally 
to the whole design. 

Almost as much time as Max Beerbohm has given to exhibited 
and published work he has devoted to caricatures which adorn 
private collections; and the American edition* of Seven Men is 
supplemented by drawings of six of them (the seventh man was 
the author himself). There is Enoch Soames, characteristically 
“dim ”’, snub-nosed, with a thin, vague beard “ or rather he 
had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and 
clustered to cover its retreat’: he wears a “ soft black hat of 
clerical kind but of Bohemian intention ’’. There is Savonarola 
Brown, big-headed and innocent-eyed; James Pethel inexpug- 
nably usual: there is grim, dark Braxton with wide mouth and 
savage frown; there is “ pleasant little Maltby”’, with his tiny 
moustache and dapper clothes: lastly there is A. V. Laider, a 
rather precise, pleasant-faced fellow, not in his first youth, 
dressed in an overcoat and tweed cap; and he is drawn upon the 
hotel note-paper, bearing the proprietor’s name: “ ‘The Beach 
Hotel, Linmouth, Sussex. Propr. R. Garrow”’, where the author 
is supposed to have met him. The authenticity of this address and 
of its proprietor’s name seems assured. The note-paper was, in 
fact, specially printed for that one drawing. 

Mr. Beerbohm lives in Italy, completely out of touch, his 
critics often complain, with current events and personalities in 
England. His visits to this country are brief and infrequent. But 
in that blue and sunlit distance he thinks the more. 

* Seven Men. (Alfred A. Knopf, New York.) 1919. 


M. Claude Debussy. By André Rouveyre 


5 telat sera incl 


Chapter XI 


ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY 


[oe caricature in England to-day is accepted with 


appreciation by a few. It is not a popular art, nor is it 

in the derogatory sense “ high-brow’”’. It is liked rather 
by observant people, and by those who are willing to learn how 
to observe. Before the best of caricature can be finally judged, 
some knowledge of the victim is often required by the spectator, 
apart from a common knowledge of his actions, motives, and his 
general appearance. The less responsible critics often demand 
that caricature should be understandable by everyone and fool- 
proof, and they have complained (especially with regard to Mr. 
Beerbohm) because the subjects of some caricatures are unknown 
to the public at large, or because a known subject has been treated 
in a recondite manner. This attitude is too absurd to need further 
comment. It illustrates merely an old truth: art is constantly 
struggling for recognition against ignorance, prejudice, and in- 
tolerance; in short, against stupidity. 

Though English caricature, then, does not flourish as general 
and popular comic art flourishes, it does exist: and the tradition 
of Pellegrini is carried on, apart from the work of Max Beerbohm, 
and in the heydey of his fame, by Kapp and others. 

Edmond Xavier Kapp first made a local name for himself 
when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge, and his work 
appeared in the Cambridge Magazine. 'The now defunct Onlooker 
reproduced a caricature of Sir Henry Wood in 1912, and other 
drawings appeared in the Daily News, and The New Weekly. 
Another caricature of Sir Henry Wood, which later became well- 
known, much admired, and often reproduced in the periodical 
press, was printed in the first number of Colour in the summer of 
1914. 


10g 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


After the war Kapp held his first exhibition at the Little Art 
Rooms in the Adelphi, and won immediate recognition as a 
brilliant craftsman who made caricature a “‘ serious branch of 
art’’. Mr. Beerbohm, whose generosity never fails either his 
fellows or younger men, and is trebly valuable in its sincerity, 
wrote in a letter printed at the beginning of Kapp’s catalogue: 


“If people in general rate your sense of design and your 
grasp of form, and your humour and fantasy, half as high as I 
in particular rate them, then, depend on it, your exhibition will 
be a very great success indeed.” 


Apart from the usual exclamations about malice, reasoned 
criticism was benedictory. Mr. Jan Gordon wrote of the “‘ music- 
hall bestiality which seems to be the mainspring of so much of 
our satiric art’ as being absent from Kapp’s work, though he 
too, could not resist saying, and with truth, that the caricatures 
in question were “ malin without being malicious”. Sir Claude 
Phillips found in Kapp’s drawings a threefold style—the in- 
fluence of Max, of Japan, and of his own impulses in which a 
cubistic inclination was evident. The fact is that cubism and 
other modern developments towards abstraction are of great use 
to the caricaturist: in work such as Kapp’s lies one of its most 
valuable and least impertinent functions. 

This exhibition was followed by others at the Leicester 
Galleries and elsewhere, and many of Kapp’s drawings have 
been reproduced in book form. He has a great variety of method, 
is more of an artist in the “ serious’, profound, portentous sense 
than Max, though much less of a wit. In his caricatures of in- 
dividuals he is more comprehensive than the best of caricaturists 
who are nothing else: he tries to say more at one and the same 
time, and often succeeds. He mentions, as it were, even if he 
does not comment on, more sides of a man’s character than 
Max does: but he is inclined to make guesses where Max knows. 

Of his methods, the favourite is by the use of chalk, though 
he has also been very successful with a clean, very fine pen line: 


IIo 


is 


ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY 


and in one brilliant instance he built up the curves of a face with 
minute straight pencil lines. He is not conventional; he adapts 
his methods to his subject; and if he lacks experience of human 
nature and ripe judgment, which is to be gained only from that 
experience, time will surely provide it. He makes no use at all 
of written descriptions, and, like Max Beerbohm, he is a more 
eager student of potentialities than of accomplished facts. 

Kapp may have “ derived ”’ a little from Max in his earliest 
days, but he has long ago cut those apron-strings, and stands alone. 

The caricature reproduced in this book of Mr. George 
Graves is an excellent example of Kapp’s personal and charac- 
teristic use of chalk, the interpenetrating lines and planes are 
effective without being affected. Apart from its obvious merits 
as a drawing, “ The Buffoon ”’ is an instance of a good caricature 
which is not a first-rate physical likeness. ‘‘ North American 
High-brow ”’, reprinted in Personalities after being exhibited at 
the Leicester Galleries in 1923, is the drawing, already referred 
to, made up of innumerable minute lines. If it is not a personal 
caricature it is a very fine typification. The contours of the face, 
the innocent seriousness are represented, and, even without 
the use of colour, the sallow complexion is somehow suggested : 
or rather the observer supplies the tint involuntarily, because the 
face is so perfectly characteristic. The “ Yoné Noguchi”’, the 
Japanese poet, manifests just as much of the Japanese manner as 
is appropriate. Sir Henry Wood has been caricatured very often 
by Kapp, but the drawing of him reproduced in Reflections is the 
most successful from the point of view of design: the hair, the 
fine tapering fingers are beautifully rendered. A later drawing, 
not nearly so pleasing as a design and contradicting certain 
details of the previous one, is far better as a portrait-caricature. 
In “ Sir Landon Ronald” (Kapp’s interest in musicians has 
been explicit from the outset of his career) the figure, the clothes, 
and the most prominent feature are strongly exaggerated. But 
exaggeration in this case is neither wilfulness nor satire: it justly 
illustrates both a characteristic attitude and a peculiar and 
emotional force of personality. 


IIlI 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


Of the politicians, the knuckles of an enormous hand obtrude 
beyond the coat of Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, whose face in this 
drawing is a mine of curious information: for one thing, you see 
the sophisticated politician jesting with the simple person. Will 
the simple person recognize that fact, here or elsewhere? Not he. 

To the Law Journal of 1924, Kapp contributed a series in 
coloured chalk of legal notabilities. The best of these is “ Mr. 
Justice Avory’’. The caricature is a triumph of characterization, 
it is redolent of learning, precision, and the acidity of high 
human justice. “‘ Sir Edward Marshall Hall, K.C.” is not so suc- 
cessful: the drawing shows that learned counsel in a reflective 
mood which may be characteristic, but is hardly typical. It_ 
seems as though Kapp had wilfully determined to show his 
subject in an unexpected way. ‘That is well enough, but in his 
effort to avoid the obvious or expected, the artist has missed 
some essential quality. The outlines of this drawing are made 
with a fine pen line. “ Sir Thomas Willes Chitty, Bt.” is a really 
beautiful drawing in which the facial exaggeration is slight, and 
in which the use of chalk both for fine black lines and for broad 
effects is extremely cunning. It is a curious fact, which finds its 
parallel in other cases, that Kapp is quite unable to make a 
satisfactory caricature either physical or otherwise of Max 
Beerbohm. He has made several attempts: all of them are bad. 
The subject is a difficult one and has only once been attempted 
with real success. ‘That was the caricature in Vanity Fair made 
by Mr. Walter Sickert in 1897, and that, not unnaturally, bears 
but a mitigated resemblance to the subject as he is nearly thirty 
years later. The best caricatures of Max Beerbohm have been 
made by himself, and of these oddly enough by no means the 
least considerable in physical fidelity is that which is used as a 
frontispiece to this book. Here the caricaturist is seen drawing 
at a desk on the Italian shore, while Kapp, Quiz, and another 
‘‘ wonder how long the veteran exile will go doddering on”’. He 
has added half a century or so to his age and has given himself 
a long white beard: but the actual likeness is a good one, the 
potential likeness a wonderful adumbration. 


112 


ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY 


Out of a comparatively small collection—for the normal 
working years of the artist’s life are fortunately before him— 
perhaps the most interesting drawing of all is that of Dr. Einstein. 
There is in it only a faint breath of caricature. Regarding this 
drawing Mr. Laurence Binyon said that its subject appeared to 
be “ intoxicated by the conception of incredible velocities, and 
tinged with innocent bewilderment at the world’s helpless in- 
capacity to follow him ”’. 

Apart from his work in caricature, his portraits in oil or in 
chalk, his various drawings of still-life, Kapp has also invented 
what is something rather more than an amusing game. This is a 
scribbling with pen and ink which he calls Minims and a selection 
of which he has published in a book of that name. These are, 
as it were, portraits of emotions and moods. If there is any point 
in trying to draw abstractions, he has put his finger on it. These 
scribbles are not the result of deliberation or conscious clever- 
ness: they result from the impulse of a moment. Quick—how do 
you draw toothache? Instantly it goes down on the paper, an 
odd little pattern which really does suggest that particular form 
of torture. ‘“‘ Indecision” is more obvious—intersecting lines 
forming a cross, the points of which are turned at right angles. 
Which way? We don’t know: we can’t think: we wobble. 

There are many people who regard Minims as a singular 
waste of time, as an arrant form of fatuity. They are people who 
would regard you as a harmless imbecile if you told them that 
Monday is white, Wednesday blue and Saturday a sort of old- 
gold (which they are), and who would like to kick you from here 
to Jericho for associating, with child-like sincerity and absolute 
lack of pose, as some people do associate, two ideas which in sober 
and commonplace fact are entirely independent and irrelative. 

Some men such as Max Beerbohm are caricaturists by nature; 
some, such as Kapp, by chance. With him indeed caricature 
seems to be a phase through which he and other artists must 
pass in the course of their long apprenticeship. He may for a 
long time and possibly always remain faithful to this art, but 
his deepest impulse seems to urge him towards normal por- 


113 I 


A HISTORY \ORSCAR TOA die 


traiture. He is first and foremost a beautiful draughtsman, who 
loves drawing for its own sake. Picturesqueness and other forms 
of false sentiment, as such, he ruthlessly abjures. A fine draughts- 
man can make a common cistern and a couple of lead pipes 
interesting and this is, in fact, exactly what before now Kapp 
has done. But as a caricaturist he has shown us all sorts of new 
possibilities and new interests. He is the first caricaturist to 
employ abstractions appropriately and fertile with suggestions. 
He is a perfectly serious artist, whose drawings, quite apart from 
their merits as satiric portraits and commentaries on his con- 
temporaries, have a definite esthetic interest ; and can be judged 
therefore by quite different standards from thosein which satire, or 
humour, or devilry, or revelation alone are the dominant quality. 

Neatness, slickness, novelty in technique are always interest- 
ing, but the better they are the more they tend to obscure the 
artist’s essential demerits as a caricaturist. Mr. Powys Evans’ 
first exhibition (1922) was of a series of pen and ink caricatures 
of persons in the Beggar’s Opera as performed at the Lyric 
Theatre, Hammersmith. His manner of drawing is peculiarly 
suited to caricature, a clean but not very spontaneous use of a 
pen line, with a certain ingenuous fondness for detail—the sort 
of detail that interests a child, and which is warmly regarded only 
by child-like vision. In the Beggar’s Opera drawings Mr. Evans 
suggested the character of a part mainly by drawing attention 
to costumes with which everyone who had seen the play or 
pictures of the performers was familiar. Some of his physical 
likenesses of the actors and actresses were extremely poor: he is 
indeed very variable in this respect. It was evident that, so far 
as this play was concerned, the costume was what mainly 
interested him rather than the individuals. Variable in success 
too have been the actual portraits he has made and published 
in the London Mercury. 

Not long after this exhibition, Mr. Evans, signing himself 
Quiz, became the regular caricaturist week by week in the 
Saturday Review. Here his success has again been variable, so 
far as physical likeness is concerned and, like the small boy in 


114 


ee iN 
ee 


PMaGlAND AND AMERIGA TO-DAY 


the rhyme, when he was good he was very, very good and when 
he was bad he was horrid. Like Kapp, like others he has failed 
to interpret Max Beerbohm: he has failed more dismally, for he 
has not perceived in this subject the importance of fidelity to 
certain facts in regard to costume. Mr. Beerbohm is a dandy 


and his dandyism without calling any undue attention to itself 


is of a personal and original kind: it is all-of-a-piece with his 
work both written and drawn, with himself. He is an artist in 
life and everything that life connotes: his individual preferences 
are observable. ‘To make a caricature then of this subject with the 
collar and tie of a respectable but inelegant clerk indicates a most 
deplorable lack of vision. This may be called a very small point, 
but in the case under review it has its peculiar importance and 
indicates possible lapses in other caricatures, of other individuals 
the reality of which it is impossible for any one person to gauge. 
But there is very little liberty that can be taken with impunity 
in using a pen and ink as Mr. Beerbohm pointed out on one 
occasion with regard to Quiz’s exhibited work. The failures, the 
incompetences, the faults in drawing, the mistakes in perception 
are not easily disguised: black and white is so devastatingly 
definite. Not by such a medium will the incompetent artist gloss 
over hard facts or successfully disguise his infirmities. What he 
does, whether good or bad, is there, patent and palpable; and 
Quiz’s successes have been sufficiently numerous to be re- 
membered with great satisfaction above and long after his 
failures. 

His caricature of Mr. Edmund Blunden, the poet, is repro- 
duced here. The likeness is life-like, with just that amount and 
quality of over-statement which reveals without ridicule. There 
is here nothing to ridicule, as the good caricaturist perceives. 
The second-rate comic artist, on the other hand, seizes a physical 
peculiarity and in order to be funny adds grossness without any 
point to his exaggeration; just as he misses the lurking vulgarity 
in a face which, judged by mere measurements, is classically 
beautiful. Apart from its other qualities the caricature of Mr. 
Blunden gives pleasure to the beholder as a design. 


sip ts 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


Mr. Edmund Dulac, a Provengal by birth, though a natural- 
ized Englishman, is an illustrator who makes caricatures from 
time to time with exuberance and boldness. He has an admirable 
certainty of line, a fine faculty for composition and a keen sense 
of humour, which sometimes outruns his sense of proportion. In 
physical fact that is just what a sense of humour should do, but 
in that kind of proportion concerned with motives and character 
it should not. Mr. Dulac’s caricature reproduced here was one 
of a series which appeared in the Outlook in 1919 and 1920. It 
is called “‘ Monsieur Clemenceau as ‘ Le Grand Poilu’”’. France 
is stitching his first wound-stripe upon his sleeve, commemor- 
ating the attempt upon his life. It is to be observed that the 
artist has described with great simplicity the combined expres- 
sions of old age and sublime indifference. M. Georges Eugene 
Clemenceau had several hatreds, but only one love—France. 
Once the invader had been driven off French soil, and crippled, 
nothing else greatly mattered. That, at any rate, is what this 
caricature seems to say. 

With vigour and malevolence, Mr. Dulac made Lord Fisher 
tower over Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square: and in all his 
published work there is an appreciation of design which makes 
the lover of caricature ask for more than Mr. Dulac has hitherto 
thought fit to offer him. 

We have glanced at the work of ninety and nine just persons, 
or thereabouts; the apodosis, calling for respectful attention, is 
an Australian artist called David Low. Without undue prejudice 
it may be said that of all the terrible facetiousness of which the 
current and popular “ cartoonist” in the press is guilty Mr. 
Low’s work was symptomatic. In all matters of political and 
social comment, his drawings had but one redeeming feature, 
their technical skill. Their content was feeble, their banalities 
abysmal. But it was evident that he could draw, that he could, 
moreover, very skilfully ‘‘ catch ” a likeness. There was, however, 
no smallest hint in the work daily exhibited to the public of the 
great possibilities which he has since made manifest in his series 
of caricatures in the New Statesman. Of these the drawing of 


116 


PEE et 
‘ a « » 


ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY 


Mr. Hilaire Belloc, hands on knees, would alone be sufficient to 
make a reputation in a really civilized community. The likeness 
is a “ speaking ” one, the frown of intolerance, the exuberance, 
the vitality, the generosity, the humour, all are there. His ‘* Lord 
Beaverbrook ” too—a little man lost in the depths of a big arm- 
chair is treated in a most perceiving way. At the time of writing 
Mr. Low holds a distinguished though recent place in the ranks 
of true caricaturists. Much is to be expected of him. 

Of other living caricaturists, Mr. W. K. Haselden best known 
as a humorous artist engaged in the most lamb-like form of 
satire, illustrates week by week Mr. Punch’s dramatic criticism 
with little, revealing drawings of actors and actresses, in which 
a likeness is deftly captured and some comment on the manner 
of performance and the character of the part are adroitly con- 
veyed. His exaggerations of faces and figures is of the slightest; 
the result in the most unassuming guise is very admirable 
indeed. 

Mr. H. M. Bateman is the most widely known and deservedly 
popular comic artist of the day, who generally provokes loud 
laughter, but who knows also how to initiate a sly, malicious grin. 
He seldom caricatures individuals in the true sense, but on the 
rare occasions that he does so, we are duly grateful. His early 
work was very obviously influenced by that of Caran D’Ache, but 
he has since become quite independent, and as a black and white 
humorist in a general way he has indeed outstripped that master. 
His caricatures of types, such as his “ Colonels ”’ carry exag- 
geration of expression and action to the limit of imagination and 
are uproariously funny: his little book Suburbia (by which is 
intended a figurative rather than a topographical location) pins 
all manner of petty snobberies and facetiousnesses to the pillory 
by the ear. In the realm of personal satire his drawing of Jack 
Johnson, the pugilist, is wholly malign and wholly admirable. 

Other artists in England play with caricature, spasmodically, 
and success treats them capriciously. Mr. Aubrey Hammond 
primarily a theatrical designer of original and amusing talent, 
does from time to time record a physical likeness with a great 


117 


A HISTORY OF CARICATURE 


simplicity, but without going any deeper. He is inclined to 
subordinate the necessities of caricature to the personal manner- 
ism by which he expresses it. 


In the United States of America the most prolific carica- 
turist, who has done much to revive the art, is Mr. Ralph 
Barton. His group of a number of English novelists given to 
lecturing in the United States some years ago was very success- 
ful, and was the cause of his abandoning comic draughtsman- 
ship of a more general kind and of his transforming into regular 
work what he had until then regarded merely as a recreation and 
amusement. He once said that he had drawn so many caricatures 
that he must now wait for new subjects to be born. He had “ gone 
through ” the American theatre and figures in ‘‘ La Vie New- 
Yorkaise’’. He admits falling before now into the bad habit, when 
haste called him, of drawing from photographs; once even from 
the description of an eye-witness! Mr. Barton does not, then, 
pretend to be a virtuoso, and he believes in drawing from life 
rather than from memory. 

A new use for caricature was found by him when he made 
a curtain for the Chauve-Souris, which showed M. Balieff 
dominating a hundred and fifty actual as well as typical first- 
nighters. Surely no caricaturist ever enjoyed before so generous 
an exhibition! This curtain was received both in New York and 
in the provinces with great enthusiasm. 

Mr. Barton’s self-caricature, which, with great kindness, he 
made specially for this book, is accompanied by an ominous 
figure, who is the Celebrity-at-large, who in life always comes 
sooner or later to Mr. Barton to inform him that while everyone 
else in a group of caricatures has been well perceived, he has 
been missed. ‘The mingled resignation and innocence in the 
artist’s own face during the interview is delightfully caught. 

Mr. Barton’s wide popularity in America has demanded 
from him far more work for publication than is salutary for the 


118 


ENGLAND AND AMERICA TO-DAY 


hand and eye of any one artist. In conversation once, Sem de- 
clared him to be une espéce de Ford. 

It was largely owing to the unselfish kindness of Mr. Barton 
and to the admiration of Mr. Carl van Vechten, the well-known 
American writer, that the first chance, brilliantly and success- 
fully seized upon, was given to a young Mexican, Miguel 
Covarrubias, who was born but ten years before the war. He 
too believes in drawing from the life: he combines some of the 
tricks of modern simplification with a distinguished facility for 
recording likenesses. His caricatures are wildly exaggerated, 
savagely cruel sometimes, but nearly always in a physical 
respect almost marvellously successful. His method varies from 
a clean, almost mechanically accurate pen line to elaborate 
designs in pencil and wash. In his book The Prince of Wales and 
other Famous Americans, the title-subject is handled both in the 
frontispiece and in various manifestations upon the wrapper 
with great skill. Upwards of fifty Americans are caricatured and 
a number of foreigners, including Mr. William Somerset 
Maugham, with spirit and invention. Nor does he exclude women 
from the onslaughts of his strong pen-line. Miss Lilian Gish is 
observed with a certain relentlessness, which will not be unwel- 
come to those who remember the type of film in which that 
gifted lady is called upon to act, rather than her personal beauty. 
The caricature is sob-stuff incarnate. ““ Miss Mary Pickford ”’, 
all eyelashes and brightness, will also fail to be popular with those 
who take their pictures seriously. The assertive incorruptibility 
of Mr. H. L. Mencken, the almost horrible vigour of Jack 
Dempsey are personified with an agreeable devilry. There is as 
yet little subtlety in Mr. Covarrubias’ work: but a caricaturist 
who begins as he has done ought to be welcomed with open 
arms. 


11g 


END 

“ Will you not,” asks a child of about five as described in 
certain works of an hundred years ago, “ will you not relate to us, 
dear Papa, some History or Account of one of the Arts, which 
will improve our minds and elevate our thoughts? ” 

~ Indeed, my dear children (for such it is my privilege to 
call you), I deem it both a pleasure, and a duty which I owe to 
you, to endeavour from time to time to mingle instruction with 
what I may term entertainment, for your benefit. . . . ” 

The preceding pages are, then, to represent both that 
pleasure and that endeavour. 


The Earl of Lonsdale 
By the Author 


— 


BUBLLOGRAP HY 


+ Bayard, E.: La Caricature et Les Caricaturistes, Paris 1901. 
Beerbohm, Max: Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen (Leonard 
Smithers), 1896. 

The Poets’ Corner (Heinemann), 1904. 

A Book of Caricatures (Methuen), 1907. 

Cartoons : The Second Childhood of fohn Bull (Stephen Swift), 1911. 
* Fifty Caricatures (Heinemann), 1913. 
v A Survey (Heinemann), 1921. 
« Rosetti and His Circle (Heinemann), 1922. 
+ Things New and Old (Heinemann), 1923. 
* Observations (Heinemann), 1925. 

[These are collections of Mr. Beerbohm’s exhibited work, including a few cari- 
catures not previously shown. Other caricatures by the same hand are scattered in 
various periodical publications and in books by other people.] 

Bergson, Henri: Laughter: An Essay on the meaning of the Comic. 
Authorized Translation by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred 
Rothwell (Macmillan), 1911. 

Bourgeois, Emile: Modern France: 1815-1913 (Cambridge University 
Press), 1919. 

\ Brisson, Adolphe: Nos Humoristes (Société d’edition artistique), Paris, 
1900. 
Cary, Elizabeth Luther: Honoré Daumier (Putnam), 1907. 
Champfleury, Jules Fleury: Histoire de la Caricature Antique, 1865. 
. Histotre de la Caricature au Moyen Age, 1871. 
| Histoire de la Caricature sous la République, 1874. 
| Histoire de la Caricature la Réforme et la Ligue, 1880. 
. Histoire de la Caricature Moderne, 1865. 
(Libraire de la Société des gens de lettres), Paris. 

[Champfleury’s works embrace all caricature in its widest possible sense, are 
full of scholarly appreciation, and are sufficiently illustrated with small line draw- 
ings. These books are indispensable to the student of the subject.] 

Chatto, W.: Treatise on Wood-Engraving. With illustrations engraved on 
wood by John Jackson (Charles Knight), 1839. 

Cloud, Yvonne: Pastiche : a Music-Room Book. With twenty-eight draw- 
ings by Edmond X. Kapp (Faber and Gwyer), 1926. 

" Covarrubias, Miguel: The Prince of Wales and other Famous Americans 
(Alfred A. Knopf, London), 1926. 


I2I 


BIBLIOGRA LAY 


Dayot, Armand: Les Maitres de la Caricature Frangaise au 19" stécle, 
Paris, 1888. 

Evans, Powys: The Beggar’s Opera : Caricatures (Cecil Palmer), 1922. 

*Everitt, Graham: English Caricaturists of the Nineteenth Century (Swan, 
Sonnenschein), 1886. 

[A misleading title, the author being a first-rate authority on comic art, ex- 

clusive of caricature.] 

Fry, Roger: Vision and Design (Chatto and Windus), 1920. 

_ [An indispensable book for the general student of art.] 

Fuchs, Eduard: Die Karikatur der Europdischen Volker. 2 vols. (A. 
Langen), Munich, 1go1 and 1ga2r. 

[A comprehensive survey of caricature and satiric art, profusely and finely 
illustrated; learned, but not well arranged in chronological order. An invaluable 
work of reference. | 
Gautier, Paul: Le Rive et la Caricature. Préface par Sully Prudhomme 

(Hachette), Paris, 1906. 

[A scientifically arranged book, sparsely but intelligently illustrated.] 
Goncourt, de, Edmund et Jules: Gavarni: L’Homme et l’cuvre. 
Gourmont de, Remy (see Rouveyre, André). 

Grego, Joseph: Rowlandson, The Caricaturist (Chatto and Windus), 1880. 
Grose, Francis, F.S.A.: Rules for Drawing Caricaturas. With an Essay on 
Comic Painting, 1788. 

[The copy of this work in the British Museum is bound up with The Analysis 
of Beauty, by William Hogarth, “‘ written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas 
of Taste’’. A curious and admirable little work.] 

Kapp, Edmond Xavier: Personalities : Twenty-four Drawings (Martin 
Secker), 1919. 

Reflections (Jonathan Cape), 1922. 
(See also Cloud, Yvonne.) 
[Selections from the artist’s exhibited work, not all caricatures.] 

Lacroix, Paul (see Rabelais, Francois). 

Larwood, Jacob, and Hotten, J.C.: History of Signboards, 1864, 

Lynch, Bohun: Max Beerbohm in Perspective (Heinemann), paar: 
(With a Prefatory letter by Max Beerbohm.) 

Malcolm, James Peller, F.S.A.: Historical Sketch of the an of Carica- 
turing, 1813. 

[One of the earliest books on the subject, well illustrated by the author’s own 
engravings, which, especially in the case of drawings i in the Harleian MSS., very 
closely and accurately follow the originals. ‘The work is badly arranged, and is ‘often 
more amusing than the author intended; but it is extremely useful and is the 
foundation of most of the later works on Caricature written in English.] 


* Pseudonym for William Rodgers Richardson. 
I22 


Buse LO.G RAE HS, 


Onions, Oliver: The Art of Henry Ospovat, with an Appreciation by Oliver 
Onions (St. Catherine Press), 1911. 
Parton, James: Caricature and other Comic Art in all times and many 
lands (Harper Brothers), 1877. 
[A concise chronological study of the subject, lucidly arranged and copiously 
illustrated. | 
Paston, George (pseudonym): Social Caricature in the Eighteenth Century 
(Methuen), 1905. 
[Finely illustrated, amusing, and admirably arranged.] 
Pike, Luke Owen: History of Crime in England, 1873. 
Rabelais, Francois (attributed to): Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel. 
Edited by Paul Lacroix. 1868. 
Rasi, Luigi: La Caricatura e 1 Comict ttaliant. 1907. 
[The letterpress is negligible and gives very little information. ‘There are, how- 
ever, many excellent illustrations.] 
Rouveyre, André: Visages des Contemporains. Préface par Remy de 
Gourmont (Mercure de France). 1913. 
Ward, Leslie (Sir): Forty Years of “ Spy” (Chatto and Windus). 1915. 
Wright, Thomas, F.S.A.: History of Caricature and Grotesque in Litera- 
ture and Art. Illustrated by F. W. Fairholt, F.S.A. (Virtue 
Brothers), 1865. 
England Under the House of Hanover (Richard Bentley), 1848. 
[Admirable, exhaustive, and invaluable works, which include researches into all 
satiric art from the earliest times. The illustrations, judged from a pictorial point 
of view, are poor, being for the most part mere notes in line copied from various 
originals and engravings: but they are extremely useful in helping the student to 
identify these originals in collections elsewhere.] 


123 


INDEX 


A—o (see le Strange, Roland) 

Academy, Royal, 57 

Aigrefeuille, Marquis d’, 80 

Alexander VI, Pope, 28, 34, 35 

America, Caricature in, 118, 119 

Ape (see Carlo Pellegrini) 

Batt I, 30 

Balzac, 85, 86 

Barrés, Maurice, 69 

Barton, Ralph, 98, 118, 119 

Bateman, H. M., 117 

Baudelaire, Charles, 85 

Beardsley, Aubrey, 28, 101 

Beerbohm, Max, vii, 17, 53, 64, 71, 97- 
Beggar’s Opera, The, 114 112 
Bella, Stefano della, 47 

Belloc, Hilaire, 117 

Benjamin, 81 

Bergson, Henri, 5 

Binyon, Laurence, 113 

Blunden, Edmund, 115 

Boldrini, 25 

Book of Caricatures, A, 101 

Bourgeois, Emile, 83 

Bowles, Thomas Gibson, 70, 73 

Boxing Match, A, 58 

Browne, Hablot Knight (Phiz), 4 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 3 

Brueghel Pieter, the elder, 28, 29 

Bubble companies, 48, 49 

Bull, John, 54, 61, 64, 104 

Bunbury, Henry William, 51 

CALLOT, Jacques, vii, 10, 29, 30, 31, 47, 
Calvin, 38, 39, 43 [59 
Cambacérés, 80 

Canta Gallina, 30, 47 

Capricct di Varie Figure, 30 

Caran D’Ache (Emmanuel Poirée), 88, 89, 
Caricature, La, 80, 81 [117 
Caricature and other Comic Art, 17 
Caricature Magazine, 63 

Cartoons: The Second Childhood of John 
Caruso, 95 [Bull, to1 
Cavaliers, 41 


124 


Cham (Amédée de Noé), 24, 86, 88 

Champfleury, Jules Henri, 12, 16-19, 27, 
28, 81 

Characters and Caricaturas, 47, 78 

Charivari, Le, 82, 83, 85 

Charles I, 41 

Charles IT, 43 

Charles X, 56, 86, 87 

Chataigner, 79 

Christie’s, 62 

City trained bands, 53 

Clarke, Mrs. Mary Anne, 58.- 

Clemenceau, M., 89, 107, 116 

Clement VII, Pope, 37 

Conrad, Joseph, 1 

Continental caricature, 76-92 

Covarrubias, Miguel, 92, 96, 119 

Cranach, Hans, 33 

Cranach, Lucas, 33 

Cromwell, Oliver, 42 

Cruikshanks, the, 4, 62 

Cruikshank, George, 7, 55, 65-67, 77, 78 

DANDIES, 64 

Dandizettes, 64 

Dantan, 88 

Daumier, Honoré, vii, 80-86 

Dead, Book of the, 11 

Debussy, Claude, 108 

Decamps, Alexandre, 80, 87 

Degas, 73 

Derby, Lord, 62 

Devil in caricature, the, 14, 17-19, 39, 44 

Dighton, Robert and Richard, 9, 20, 67, 

Disraeli, 71 [68, 78, 105 

Doddington, George Bubb, 46 

Don Pirlone, Il, 88 

Doré, Gustave, 86, 87 

Doyle, John and Richard, 4, 68 

Dreyfus, 89 

Dulac, Edmund, 116 

Dusart, Cornelis, 43 

Epict of Nantes, Revocation of, 43 

Egyptian caricature, 11 

Erasmus, 32, 33 


oe ee a 


INDEX 


Evans, Powys (Quiz), 112, 114, 115 
Everitt, Graham, 4, 6, 8, 55, 86 
FarrEN, Miss, 62 

Fashion-Caricature, 31 

Forain, 89 

Fox, Charles James, 63, 

Fraser, Claude Lovat, 95 

French caricature, 19, 27, 76-91 

French revolution, 78, 79} 

Fry, Roger, | 

Fuchs, Eduard, 6, 26 

Furniss, Harry, 96 

GamMBETTA, 89 

Gaudissart, 80 

Gaultier, Paul, 6 

Gauthier, Théophile, 85 

Gavarni (S. P. Chevalier), 80, 82, 85-87 
George III, 61 

German caricature, 26, 27, 91, 92 
Ghezzi, Pier Leone, 79 

Gill, André (Gosset de Guine), 89 
Gillray, James, 9, 24, 51,54, 55,57, 59-62, 
Giraldus, Cambrensis, 23 [65, 105 
Gladstone, Mr., 71 

Gobbi, I., 30 

Gourmont, Remy de, 6, 90, 91 
Goursat, Georges (see Sem) 

Giz, 78 

Grandville, 80 

Greek caricature, 12 

Grego, Joseph, 55, 57 

Grose, Francis, 3, 65 

Grossmith, George, 94 

Gulbransson, Olaf, 20, 91, 1o1 
Hame_rTOoN, Philip Gilbert, 67 
Hammond, Aubrey, vili, 117 

Hanlon, William, 50 

Harleian collection, 21, 24 

Haselden, W. K., 117 

Heath, William, 63 

Historical Sketch of the Art of Cartca- 
Hobby-horse, 64 [turing, 13 
Hogarth, William, 47, 48, 52, 53, 78 
Holbein, 19, 32 

Hooghe, Romeyn de, 47 

Horace, 2 

Hubert, 78 

Humphreys, 51, 59, 60 

INCROYABLES, Les, 80, 87 

Indian caricature, 12 


125 


Irish warriors, 23, 24 

Isaac of Norwich, 20, 21 

Isabey, the elder, 24, 79 

Italian opera, 50 

James IT, 43 

Jehu junior, 73 

Jews in caricature, the, 20-21 

Johnson, Dr., 1, 4, 53 

Journal Pour Rire, 87 

Jugend, 91 

Julius II, Pope, 28 

Kapp, Edmond Xavier, 109-114 
Kartkatur der Europdischen Vélker, Die, 6 
Kenyon, Lord, 62 

Keppel, Admiral Sir Harry, 75 
Kladderadatsch, 91 

Laocoon, the, 25, 26 

Laud, Archbishop, 41 

Law, John, 48, 49 

Léandre, Charles, 88, 89 

Leech, John, 4, 68 

Leonardo da Vinci, 25, 47 

Le Strange, Roland, 74, 75 

Liszt, Abbé, 73, 74 

London Mercury, The, 114 

Louis XIV, 43-45, 49 

Louvre, Musée de, 12 

Lovat, Simon Lord, 48 

Low, David, 116, 117 

MacalreE, Robert, 82, 85, 88 

Macaulay, Lord, 1 

Maintenon, Madame de, 44 

Malcolm, James Peller, 13-16, 21, 40, 53, 
Marks, Arthur J., 73 [54, 76 
Marlborough, Sarah Duchess of, 46 
Marriott, Charles, 9, 10 

Mary, Queen, 16 

Maugham, W. S., 92, 119 

Maurier, George du, vii, 68 

May, Phil, 96 

Mayeux, 82, 85 

Melanchthon, Philip, 33, 35, 36 
Mencken, H. L., 119 

Mercure de France, 90 

Merveilleuses, les, 80 

Minims, 113 

Monnier, 80, 82, 83 

Napo_eon I, 54, 60, 63, 79, 85, 90, 104, 
Napoleon III, 77 [105 
New Statesman, The, 116-117 


o7 


se. 
. 
ac 
‘ 


AIAN 


i 


<< 


The Public Record Office. 


(Plate 1) 


A caricature of Isaac of Norwich and other Jews from the head 


of an Exchequer roll of a.p. 1233 


gz6 ON ‘SW UvIopLTeEy 
UI SSUIMVIP POINO[OD JOYE WORT JoT[aq sowel fq ssutavisuyq 


"ULNasSnpY YSYIAT 
‘sadzassnuv py fo guampavgagr (II 21d) 


(at PIP UpooTP Py 


eid [pay 


23 


ee” 


= 


at Baie Died 


Leonardo da Vinct. 
(Plate II1) 


Department of Prints and Drawings, 
British Museum. 


A sheet of caricatures 


—— ss re 


Heung oes Dunc labs 


su Gretberg /Ooctoris Marent 
Luthers. 


Mine 
wy a 


WN 
WSS Ny 
LS SN Ass : 
SAS 
RUZ ~e& 
ANN 


(Plate IV) From “ Die Karikatur der Europaischen 
Volker”, by Eduard Fuchs. 


THE MONK-CALF OF FREIBERG 


(After a German wood-engraving. F irst half 
of the sixteenth century) 


. 


a 


a ha 


I ae a a 


ee ee ee 


= 


a ee 


A\\\ Gee 


\ \\ 1 | \ 
NE (ARYAN A\ 


(Plate V) From“ A Treatise on Wood Engraving”, 
by W. Chatto and John Jackson. 


A reputed caricature of Martin Luther 


(After a German wood-engraving. First half 
of the sixteenth century) 


: “ieepaeens patente 


eke 


y 
e 


¢ 


; 
¢ 
Bb 


© Wh Cineinrechter weinfclaud FImalter aBerwirds mir fdyweer 


Suir auff der RadwerG meinen Baudy Wen mie mein groffer wamft ftectleee 
Ich haG mirszogenein fay (ten Bacher Dnd tft alls durdy den Ars gefarer 
Dnd mag mit fein yes wol geladyen Dasma icy waynenin alten Jaren. 


. 
Ps 
7 
L 


oy See ee See 


(Plate VI) From “ Die Karikatur der Europdischen 
Volker”, by Eduard Fuchs. 


THE TOPER 


(After a German wood-engraving of 1510) 


(II snynf{ edog jo ainyeories v SI yo] 94} UO VY, ‘sBuravssus-poom youary s191sV) 


(IIA 4d) 
"4 JINASOIUD J ap SANDIBWIOACT SISUOS SIT ,, UlOAT ‘SIDJIQOY S103UDAY 07 PIjNQrypy 


rh 


eK 


2 Nov. 17g 


| BILLY POLITICAL PLAYTHING. ** 


7 

r Richard Newton. Department of Prints and Drawings, 
; (Plate VIIT) British Museum. 
G 


William Pitt and Charles James Fox 
(After a coloured print of 1796) 


—— SSIW GCNV YMOH IVYANAD 


(XJ 270d) 
“ay0) puousag uivjygv7 “UOSPUDIMOY SvULOY T 


ames Gillray. Department of Prints and Drawings, 
(Plate X) British Museunt. 


The Tsar Paul I of Russia 


AVIEW fromMAGDALEN HALL,OXFORD. 


Robert Dighton. Captain Desmond Coke. 
(Plate X/) 


An Oxford Don 


Honoré Daumter. Department of Prints and Drawings, 
(Plate XI) British Museum. 


ACTUALITES: IRLANDE ET JAMAIQUE 


” 


Pea SL TTETIEL agence 


(After a coloured lithograph) 


William Nicholson, Esq. 


if 
/ 


Piet ge 4 

ele” amar 

satis a - oe 
Vai e 


ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE 
(A study on blotting-paper for the caricature 
in Vanity Fair, 1874) 

From Zhe Winter Owl, 1923 


Carlo Pellegrini (Ape 
(Plate XII1) 


M Beerbohm. Philip Guedalla, Esq. 
(Plate XIV) 
“MR. SWINBURNE, JUNE 1899” 


Roland le Strange (A-o) From “Vanity Fair”, 1903. 
(Plate XV) 


” 


“04 
(Admiral of the Fleet the Honourable Sir Henry Keppel) 


\) “i 
ay SRE 
Nee 
‘ 
1 
s 
‘ 
pu 
\ 
peer 
‘ 
. 
¢ 
’ 


Pa TP Ra NY IRTP ite er eS Ry 


Se ean 


Captain Desmond Coke. 


ow 


GEORGE GROSSMITH 


MR 


NE GENO Te PIL HI em ae OIE ONE MO ea NUK 7 


nese ge am y a ER, ES oe PR eee ANNE ERATOR LAI EEN ONES RAIA wasn cntn 


me 
ig 


¥ 


hive Seat Re tet Aid 
# 
flenry Ospovat. 
(Plate X V7) 


a ne een en TET ST SIRE tatters: tena 


\) 


\ 
IER 


From “The Outlook”, 1919. 


Edmund Dulac. 
(Plate XVII) 
“HIS FIRST WOUND-STRIPE” 


(Monsieur Clemenceau) 


Ty! 
rea 


Edmond Xavier Kapp. The Artist. 
(Plate XVIII) 


BUFFOON 


(George Graves enlarging our vocabulary) 


7 
a 


ee ft 


ee ae 


_y - 


ee a ee 


Sa ae es 


Ee eo Nee ee 


SSS Se ee eee 


. 


ee a ee ee ee ee a 


Powys Evans (Quiz). 
(Plate X1X) 


RL) 
"% 
Ole 


ZS 


C2 


SCO IRO 


%2 


MDESLoAs 
SVR 


iS 


N= Kw AN ea 
Wiireatatiamme _/ 


From “ The Saturday Review”, 1923. 


MR. EDMUND BLUNDEN 


Ralph Barton. 
(Plate XX) 


AS OTHERS SEE US 


(A celebrity-at-large and, on the right, a self-caricature) 


97-24 2F) 


GETTY CENTER LIBRARY 


UTE 


